The company has been a key part of user lawsuits before: The Wall Street Journal reported in 2020 that TikTok and ByteDance “orchestrated” a user lawsuit against former President Donald Trump’s TikTok ban.
[The New York Times]
CNBC shared this from a Google all-hands this month:
At an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president in charge of search, told employees that the company was working on ways for search to display helpful resources in results without requiring users to add “Reddit” to their searches. Raghavan acknowledged that users had grown frustrated with the experience.
“Many of you may wonder how we have a search team that’s iterating and building all this new stuff and yet somehow, users are still not quite happy,” Raghavan said. “We need to make users happy.”
One tool to try and help with that is Google’s new Perspectives feed that’s designed to show results from humans. But now that many of the protesting subreddits have opened up, the Reddit trick isn’t as nerfed as it used to be.
That’s something Roku CEO Anthony Wood said in an interview with Axios. It’s not surprising he feels that way: the company has dived in headfirst on smart home gear, announcing a smart home security system in May and some gadgets like a video doorbell and smart plugs in October. If those gadgets are a hit, they could be a huge boon to Roku’s business and give the company an additional way to grow beyond its work in TVs and TV software.
“As you have no doubt heard by now, Reddit management introduced changes recently that have led to rule and moderation changes across many subreddits,” a user with a flair indicating they’re a Minecraft developer wrote in a post. “Because of these changes, we no longer feel that Reddit is an appropriate place to post official content or refer our players to.”
We’ve contacted Microsoft to see if other studios it owns are taking the same approach.
If you know of other gaming studios — or any company, actually — that is moving on from Reddit in response to recent changes, I’d love to hear about it. You can email me at [email protected].
Three Reddit moderators have just told me that Reddit is sending a message to closed communities asking if they plan to reopen.
Here’s the full message, taken from screenshots I’ve seen:
The last time we messaged you, you were still discussing your mod team’s plans to re-open your community, had decided to close your community indefinitely, or had not responded to us. Per Rule 4 of the Moderator Code of Conduct, moderators are required to be active and engaged within their communities. Given this, we encourage you to reopen. Please let us know within the next 48 hours if you plan on re-opening.
The 48-hour timing is notable; Reddit mods had asked the company for a response to an open letter by June 29th (which would be 48 hours from now), and that means that this deadline would be up just a day before many popular Reddit apps are set to shut down on June 30th.
Some users on the Sync for Reddit subreddit reported running into rate limits on Tuesday, and Apollo for Reddit developer Christian Selig tells The Verge he’s been seeing rate limits, too.
While that might sound like an early rollout ahead of the official July 1st start date, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge that the company hasn’t implemented the rate limits ahead of schedule and that Reddit had a bug on its end on Monday. “Folks shouldn’t be experiencing issues anymore, as it was resolved yesterday,” Rathschmidt says.
Update June 27th, 2:31PM ET: Added further comment from Reddit.
Mark Gurman reports that Apple is moving the systems from iPhone Xs, a phone that first came out nearly six years ago, to iPhone 14s, which came out last year.
