Reddit was founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman, Aaron Swartz, and Alexis Ohanian. Since then, it has become one of the largest and liveliest social platforms on the internet. Without Reddit, we might never have AMAs. It’s not quite as mainstream as platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok, but Reddit’s seemingly infinite supply of communities — known as subreddits — has made it one of the web’s best sources of information and conversation. But Reddit has also been a magnet for controversy: Redditors have used the platform to spread misinformation and coordinate harassment, and it has been a source of illegal and problematic content for years. In 2023, Reddit brought more controversy on itself, announcing new plans to charge for its API that led to Apollo and other third-party apps shutting down along with a mass protest from users. And of course, like so many other things, the whole fight seemed to happen on Reddit.
A federal court has ruled that Reddit won’t have to reveal the identities of users that openly discussed torrenting on the platform, Gizmodo reports. As with a similar decision reported in May, the judge ruled that the First Amendment’s right to anonymous speech is more important.
The identity verification service no longer seems to be able to verify identities on Reddit — at least, not for me and a handful of others who have tweeted about it. I’m guessing this is because of Reddit’s change to start charging for API access.
On the other hand, it could be because Zoom, which bought Keybase in 2020, seems to have mostly stopped updating the service. On iOS, it’s only gotten a single bug fix in the past year.
The company announced its fourth series of Collectible Avatars on Wednesday. Reddit is putting some limits on who can buy them for the first day of launch as part of an “initial access” period.
Reddit first released Collectible Avatars last year, and they could be a way for Reddit to bring in some money as it tries to make a profit.
The collective project is ending soon, and users can only write in white, but they’re working on one last piece of protest art to send r/Place off. (Smaller versions of the message have been dropped in throughout the multi-day event.)
We’ve captured the final moments of r/Place in the gallery below.
There are some positive updates — including the creation of a new email address to report accessibility issues — but overall, the moderation team still seems very dissatisfied. r/Place, for example, is “not blind, low-vision or even keyboard accessible.”
Recently, all of Reddit’s free iOS app icons were ugly — the default became a pixelated version of the usual logo seemingly to promote r/Place — but as of a new iOS update available Monday, the app icon is back to its usual, non-pixelated look.
On a perhaps related note, Reddit said Monday that its latest r/Place expansion would be the last one, so the collaborative art project might be wrapping up soon.
Reddit has expanded the collaborative canvas multiple times since it first launched on Thursday, and while a lot of the protest art and messages have been largely buried amongst the many other designs, users are making a renewed push on a new section with a giant message cursing CEO Steve Huffman. “Targeted hate and harassment” are against the canvas rules, so I’m guessing the new message might not stay up for very long.
There is some legitimately awesome art on this year’s board, including an impressive recreation of the classic Charizard Pokémon card.
Apollo app developer Christian Selig dropped new wallpaper art of a cute hybrid of Clippy and the Reddit alien today.
Selig has been hawking fun wallpapers for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS via the Apollo app since Reddit started down a dark path of hostile changes earlier this year and Selig shuttered the popular third-party Reddit client. He’s also selling the wallpapers outside the app.
And the German flag apparently expanded to fill the new space within under three minutes. How did they do it? According to Redditor HellsOnWheels45, a Discord server with 50,000 users in active coordination.
Also, protest messages have made a comeback on r/place after largely disappearing by Friday evening, with more “fuck spez’ messages near the center of the canvas.
The moderators said they kept the sub private to protest Reddit’s API pricing after a community vote. But after getting some messages from the ModCodeOfConduct admin account pushing them to reopen, one mod said Friday they were removed from the subreddit.
“Please don’t feel bad for us — in the end, the ones being hurt here are Reddit itself and the r/Canning community,” the moderator wrote.
The community now open again, in restricted mode, and under the sole management of ModCodeOfConduct, like what I reported about r/malefashionadvice on Thursday. ModCodeofConduct is also the only moderator of r/homeautomation.
Even though the canvas is littered with messages cursing CEO Steve Huffman, Reddit still posted a video of its evolution. If Reddit decides to take the video down, I’ve been adding screenshots of the canvas throughout the day to this article.
The more than 300 subscribers on r/PlaceAPI are batting around ideas for protest art for the 2023 r/Place canvas that’s launching on Thursday.
In Reddit terms, that’s a comparatively tiny community, but they’re not the only ones thinking about how to use r/Place to share their discontent: a lot of people on Reddit’s announcement post are discussing ideas, too.
At Fast Company, Katie Notopoulos takes a deep dive into the Palantir meme-stock community:
One person in the Palantir fan Discord quipped, “Next time someone says Pili is a vampiric data-stealing, Trump-backing, AI-imposter, secretive-data-selling spytech company, you can say, ‘Sir, I object, it’s a vampiric data-stealing, Trump-backing, AI-imposter, secretive-data-selling spytech HUMANITARIAN company.’”
The stonk market is alive and well, I guess.
Toolbox is running into Reddit’s new API rate limits, but even CEO Steve Huffman said it should have free access. A Reddit admin (employee) says the company is looking into it.
Update July 11th, 6:40PM ET: The admin says the issue is fixed, and the user that posted the thread I linked to earlier about the issue says the issue appears to be resolved.
That’s based on screenshots shared in the moderator coordination subreddit, including a message from the Reddit admin (employee) account u/ModCodeofConduct.
The iOS app shut down last week. As of this writing, Apple is currently showcasing it as an Editors’ Choice app even though you can’t actually browse Reddit with it anymore. Apple is also featuring the official Reddit app right below Apollo.
Also, according to Christian Selig, the Apollo subreddit will be restricted, meaning you can’t make new posts but can chat in the comments of already-available posts.
The mods of the subreddit may be removed as a result, but they’ve accepted that.
“Our ethics won’t allow us in good faith to lie to you so Reddit can make a buck,” the mods wrote. “So when the sub gets turned over to whatever scab steps forward, we hope they have the decency to run it in a way that keeps you safe.”
Read more about the response to these warnings from Reddit in my story from Thursday, which I updated a few minutes ago.
BotDefense, a tool that helps fight bots in more than 3,600 subreddits and has nearly 150,000 accounts on its bans list, will be going away. As for why:
The community of users and moderators submitting accounts to us depend on Pushshift, the API, and third-party apps. And we would be deluding ourselves if we believed any assurances from Reddit given the track record of broken promises. Investing further resources into Reddit as a platform presents significant risks, and it’s safer to allocate one’s time, energy, and passions elsewhere.
They posted their response publicly for the community — and, presumably, Reddit — to read. According to the mods, the admin sent the moderators a message that they violated the moderator code of conduct by going NSFW.
Reddit has said it’s “not acceptable” for communities to switch to NSFW in protest of Reddit’s policies. r/PICS is trying to make the case that it should remain so given things like profanity on the subreddit, which technically counts as NSFW under Reddit’s content policy.
Users have been voting on the subreddit’s rules, and the newest one means you’ll be seeing a lot fewer actual videos in the community.
Currently, the subreddit’s rules are:
0. Posts must be videos
1. No Porn/Nudity/Gore
2. All post titles must contain profanity
3. Only text posts describing videos are permitted, and must describe a video in detail. Video links are permitted in the comments only.
r/PICS, another big subreddit, went NSFW on Monday.
In a tongue-in-cheek announcement post, the moderators said they had “no choice” because people had been posting profanity, which technically counts as NSFW (Not Safe For Work) under Reddit’s content policy. Despite the change, gore and pornography are still not allowed on the subreddit.
r/PICS has already been trying to stir the pot; it is one of a few subreddits now dedicated to John Oliver since reopening. We’ll have to wait and see if Reddit takes action against the subreddit, but it previously said that going NSFW to protest the company’s policies is “not acceptable.”
