Several sub-communities on Reddit, including popular crypto subreddits, have decided to go private for 48 hours to protest against new company policies that will restrict the use of third-party applications.
Reddit announced its plans to modify how users interact with the Reddit Data application programming interface (API) in April, which has been used by developers for seven years to create tools and utilities for moderation and other activities. Reddit’s decision to build native moderator tools directly impacts the community’s ability to create and use third-party tools mainly used for moderating content and interactions. As a result, subreddits have decided to go private or switch to read-only modes from June 12th to 14th, in protest of the upcoming change.
Major crypto communities, including r/Bitcoin, r/CryptoCurrency, and r/cardano, are among the popular subreddits dedicated to discussing Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies protesting against the change. Reddit has also faced backlash for introducing paid access to its data API.
While nearly 3,500 subreddits were estimated to become inaccessible, more communities could join the protest. However, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has backed the decision, revealing the need for being “a self-sustaining business.”
He stated, “We respect when you and your communities take action to highlight the things you need, including, at times, going private.”
Meanwhile, Reddit plans to launch mobile moderator tools for Reddit’s iOS and Android apps in the coming months to eliminate the extensive use of third-party moderator tools.
In contrast to the ongoing community retaliation, Reddit has nearly achieved a new milestone in terms of collectible avatar holders on the platform. Within a year of launching Reddit NFTs, the platform has accumulated ten million holders of its collectible avatars.
Reddit’s collectible avatar marketplace was launched on the Ethereum layer-2 scaling network Polygon in July 2022, allowing independent artists and Redditors to design customizable nonfungible token collections.