Reddit Experiments With Removing Mods, Blocking Attempts To Switch Subs To NSFW

Reddit’s ongoing war with its volunteer moderators (and users) has moved up a notch. As you’ll recall, last week, the ever tone-deaf CEO Steve Huffman insisted that the protests were just a blip, would be over by last Wednesday, and were having no real impact on the site anyway.

That hasn’t gone quite to plan.

The protests got extended, and as Huffman and Reddit made noises about removing mods of protesting subreddits, things got weird over the weekend, with mods holding votes on a variety of subs that got overwhelming support to reopen with only pictures of comedian John Oliver. And some subreddits took it even farther, requiring they be sexy pictures of John Oliver.

And, from sexy pictures of John Oliver, it didn’t take long for some subreddits to switch to being open, but for NSFW (Not Safe for Work) content: i.e., porn. This included many popular subreddits that wouldn’t normally be home to such content, such as r/interestingasfuck, r/TIHI (Thanks I Hate It), r/formula1, r/videos and even r/iOS?

Of course, this impacts Reddit in multiple ways that probably aren’t great for Reddit, or Huffman’s desire to take the company public and help investors cash out. First, it effectively makes those subreddits private, as you can’t view NSFW subs unless you’re logged in and have confirmed that you’re over 18. So, that creates some friction. But, an even bigger deal is that Reddit does not post ads on NSFW subs:

Ads for adult-oriented products and services on Reddit are no longer permissible, and Not Safe For Work (typically referred to as NSFW) subreddits will no longer be eligible for ads or targeting.

As for the claims by Huffman that the protests were not having any real impact, well… the data suggests otherwise. No, it didn’t completely crash traffic to Reddit, but an analysis by Engadget, using SimilarWeb data, showed traffic definitely did drop during the protest. While the decline in unique visitors may not seem that much at 6.6%, the more important point was that the time spent on the platform dropped even more precipitously:

The day before the protest began, an average session on the website was about eight minutes and 31 seconds long. A day later, that metric fell to seven minutes and 17 seconds, or the lowest that stat has been in the past three years.

Any such drop does not look good for investors who would be looking at buying into the company’s “vision” if they’re going to buy equity on the open market.

I’m also kind of wondering if one of the reasons for the massive drop in time spent has to do with the well known fact that the answers to Google searches are often found… on Reddit. And if people are searching for information that takes them to a Reddit thread, in the past, they’d spend some time reading through the threads. But if they do a search, and then click through to find a sub closed or overwhelmed by John Oliver or porn, they might not stick around. And, certainly, some people have noticed that the Reddit protests are also making Google worse.

Given all this bad news, it looks like Reddit and Huffman dipped their toes in the water of trying to remove these moderators thumbing their nose at Huffman. A whole bunch of folks sent over a post on the r/ModCoord subreddit in which a mod from r/MildlyInteresting (one of the subs that switched to NSFW, with support from its community) suddenly found that the entire mod team was locked out of the subreddit.

I was preparing the sub to go live, but just after I switched it to NSFW, I was logged out of my account on every single platform and locked out. I can successfully reset my password, but it will nevertheless not let me login.

Following this, another mod posted our update instead. Right after, the u/ModCodeofConduct account removed the post and flipped the sub back to restricted instead of public. Then, the second moderator was also logged out of their account and locked out. Other mods tried to re-approve the post, one of them was promptly logged out and locked out as well.

A few minutes after, the entire team was removed from the subreddit without any prior communication of any kind. As it stands, at least three of us are literally locked out of our Reddit accounts and the other mods were only removed from the sub.

It appeared that other subreddits that had gone NSFW had the same thing happen, including r/TIHI and r/interestingasfuck.

After complaining, the mod team was told that they had received a 7-day suspension, with some excuse from Reddit about how it was done to “prevent subs spamming sexually explicit material” which the r/MildlyInteresting mods insisted was never the plan in the first place.

And, of course, just as all this started to go viral, someone at Reddit HQ realized how bad all this looked and reinstated the mods:

ModMail from a different admin (not ModCoC) explains that we were apparently “swept up in actions” that they were taking against “communities that were encouraging sexually explicit content”. Situation remains really unclear, and the fact we were a mistake does not excuse r/interestingasfuck being targeted or any of the other 5 subs.

There have been other reports that Reddit staff are deliberately changing subreddits back from NSFW to SFW. Even if the community voted to support the change to NSFW.

A spokesman for Reddit, Tim Rathschmidt, (who over the weekend insisted that Reddit’s threat to remove mods was no threat at all) continues to lie through his teeth with a quote to the Verge:

“Moderators incorrectly marking a community as NSFW is a violation of both our Content Policy and Moderator Code of Conduct,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt said to The Verge when asked about the suspended mods. He declined to comment when asked if Reddit removed the mods.

Rathschmidt also seemed to get a bit snippy when the Verge’s Jay Peters followed up:

Asked if Reddit could confirm the reinstatement, Rathschmidt declined, saying, “I’m not going to set a precedent of confirming with The Verge every action we do or don’t take to ensure users can access their communities.” He didn’t elaborate on how removing a subreddit’s entire moderation team with no communication ensures users can access their communities, particularly since they were never entirely inaccessible beyond the limitations imposed by Reddit itself.

And it appears that this was just the beginning. There were reports that Reddit pulled down its content policy page. And, as I write this, that appears to be the case. Here’s what it looked like yesterday, according to the Internet Archive:

And here’s what it looked like a few hours ago as I wrote this:

Just… gone. If you pull down the language menu, you find there’s no option for English.

This morning the content policy came back, but… still.

And that same Reddit post noted that subreddits switching to NSFW now receive a popup saying that “Content tag is pending until reviewed,” suggesting that Reddit admins are now blocking the changes:

Basically, for all of Huffman’s talk of “landed gentry,” he seems to have decided that he’s the emperor, and gets to make all the decisions now.