Reddit is threatening to remove moderators who allowed private subreddits to go on indefinite strike in protest of the company's API updates. Reddit cited its Moderator Code of Conduct and said moderators are responsible for keeping communities running. If they fail to fulfill their duties, the company has the right to replace them with new moderators.
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“ Active communities are built on the strength of thousands or even millions of users, and we have a duty to keep these spaces alive ,” Reddit said . “ If a group of moderators unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community alive, we will respect their decisions and remove those who don’t want to moderate. ”
That's because more than 8,000 subreddits went offline on Monday in protest of the company's decision to charge high fees for APIs . Reddit intends to monetize data , which is used by tech companies to train large language models (LLMs), which are the basis of artificial intelligence in tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard. However, the prices are high for indie developers who build third-party Reddit apps like Apollo and RIF.
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These apps aren’t making enough money to cover their operating costs. As expected, these developers have decided to shut down their apps. They had to shut down their long-running projects on Reddit because Reddit wasn’t willing to lower its API prices. Additionally, the proposed API changes would break some moderator tools that are essential for managing subreddits. The Reddit community is understandably not happy about this.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffmanhas publicly expressed his disdain for the site’s community and developers. He described the protests as a temporary disruption that will subside in the future. Earlier this week, he sent a memo to employees , stressing that the outage has not affected the company’s revenue and urging them to stay focused and stick to the plan. The social network has not shown itself to be a developer-friendly company. It has also made no effort to keep third-party apps running.
See also: Reddit: Several apps are shutting down due to new API prices
The Reddit community is unhappy and has decided to extend its protest indefinitely, instead of the originally planned 48-hour blackout. However, the company is now threatening to take action against the moderators of the subreddit that have taken part in the protest. Many of the protesters have already stopped and opened their communities to the public. There are still over 4,000 subreddits that are private. We will have to wait and see how the situation develops in the coming days.
