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The change prevents subreddits from suddenly going ‘dark’ – an action previously used by subreddit moderators to protest company decisions.
Social media forum Reddit has updated its rules in order to prevent large subreddit communities from switching to private without warning.
From now on, Reddit moderators will have to submit a request in order to update a subreddit’s community type settings.
This applies to changing a subreddit from public to private or restricted, or vice versa. It also applies to changing communities from safe for work (SFW) or not safe for work (NSFW).
Requests will automatically be approved for communities with fewer than 5,000 members or communities that are less than 30 days old. Moderators will also still be able to instantly restrict posts or comments for seven days without submitting a request.
“When a public community goes private, all redditors (even members of that community) lose access to the community and its content,” said Laura Nestler, Reddit’s VP of community in a post on Reddit.
“Communities should honour the expectations they set – public communities should remain accessible to all; private communities should remain private.”
Nestler also outlined circumstances in which a community may need to change its type settings, in which case mechanisms are in place to do so. These include episodic events where a community may be restricted for a few hours during a live event, a crisis or safety issue or moderators wanting to take an indefinite break.
Previously, the ability to change the community type setting at will has been a way of protesting Reddit’s decisions.
Last year, thousands of subreddits went ‘dark’ in order to protest Reddit’s plans monetise access to its APIs – a move that was criticised by developers and reddit users.
In a bid to address “the elephant in the room”, Nestler said protests are allowed on Reddit, but not at the expense of public communities.
“We want to hear from you when you think Reddit is making decisions that are not in your communities’ best interests. But if a protest crosses the line into harming redditors and Reddit, we’ll step in.”
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