The protest being waged by popular subreddits over Reddit’s API changes continues, and this week it’s taken a NSFW twist.
On Monday, r/pics — a massive community with over 30 million members — officially marked itself NSFW (not safe for work), meaning Reddit is no longer able to show advertisements alongside posts appearing in the subreddit.
It’s the latest iteration of a protest that started in mid-June, when 6,500 subreddits took part in a blackout to protest Reddit’s plans to charge for API (application programming interface) access. Redditors are angry about the Twitter-like changes, which have now led to third-party apps like Apollo — which couldn’t afford the fees — having to shut down.
Since the blackout, a number of large subreddits have continued to protest Reddit’s changes in a variety of creative ways. r/pics opted to go down a very John Oliver-focused route, first only allowing images of the comedian and Last Week Tonight host to be shared on the sub and then amending their own rules so that any media featuring Oliver – including erotic fan fiction – could be posted.
A week ago, r/pics moderators shared a post discussing the level of profanity in the sub, reminding the community — via a very tongue in cheek “open letter” — not to swear in their posts, lest the mods be forced to mark the community NSFW and thus deprive Reddit of advertising revenue.
“Now we really, really don’t want to mark r/pics as being NSFW,” reads the post. “Doing so would mean that we were no longer discoverable, that we would no longer show up in Reddit’s main feeds, and that millions of people would be deprived of John Oliver’s presence on their screens. It would also have the effect of keeping Reddit from showing advertisements alongside our posts, which we feel would be unfair.”
The wording of this post is key, as Reddit has reportedly stepped in previously to remove mods for marking their communities NSFW as a form of protest. “r/pics will not be made NSFW as a form of protest,” reads the post in r/pics. “Any such change will be enacted in order to comply with Reddit’s policies. If Reddit were to remove moderators from r/pics, that action would go against their own publicly affirmed guidelines.”
All of this led to the subreddit officially being marked NSFW on Monday. Elsewhere, other Reddit communities are continuing to protest in their own ways. r/videos is currently only allowing posts that contain texts describing a video, while r/funny has an open letter to Reddit pinned at the top of the sub.
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