Reddit Tells Mods That Protesting By Changing Sub To NSFW Violates The Rules

The enshittification of Reddit continues. Yesterday we wrote about the next move from protesting mods to switch their subs to NSFW, which strips those subreddits of ads, and how Reddit was experimenting with removing the mods who did that. For what it’s worth, just a few days ago, Reddit insisted in a comment that it wasn’t “threatening” mods with removal, and then just days later it literally did remove the mods, so nice going Reddit comms: you’ve completely fucked over whatever credibility you might have had.

Anyway, late on Wednesday, a Reddit admin admitted that the company was changing its rules to say that if you change your sub to NSFW in protest, that violates the rules:

That’s a discussion where a mod asks if “transitioning from SFW to NSFW is allowed” and the main admin account that interacts with moderators, ModCodeofConduct, replied:

Thanks for asking this, we’ll have messaging going out to affected communities later today. Changing a previously SFW community to a NSFW community in order to protest Reddit policies is inappropriate for members of your community and not acceptable overall. People subscribe to communities based on the content at the time of subscription. Communities can gradually change as they grow, but this is not what we are observing and not in the best interest of the users being subjected to that content.

Incorrectly marking your community is a violation of both our Content Policy (rule 6) as well as the Moderator Code of Conduct (rule 2).

This is similar to the language that was used by Reddit’s spokesperson a day earlier, accusing the mods of violating both the Content Policy (which, you’ll recall, Reddit took down for a while) and the Moderator Code of Conduct.

But… this excuse is bullshit. The content policy rule 6 reads:

Ensure people have predictable experiences on Reddit by properly labeling content and communities, particularly content that is graphic, sexually-explicit, or offensive.

Obviously, that’s for the reverse situation of what’s happening here. That rule is clearly designed to say that if you’re hosing NSFW content you can’t label your sub SFW. Spinning that around to say that subs labeling themselves as NSFW violates that policy is just ridiculous, obnoxious lawyering.

As for the Mod Code of Conduct Rule 2, that excuse is also bullshit. This rule is for the sub to “set appropriate and reasonable expectations” and then says:

Users who enter your community should know exactly what they’re getting into, and should not be surprised by what they encounter. It is critical to be transparent about what your community is and what your rules are in order to create stable and dynamic engagement among redditors.

And so, again, you could obnoxiously lawyer this and claim the switch goes against “expectations,” but in looking over various subreddits making this change, most of the ones I’ve seen held votes of their community and asked them what they wanted to do, and clearly stated their intentions to the members of that subreddit.

So, the blanket statement that switching to NSFW in protest violates those rules is clearly inauthentic bullshit.

Even worse, moderators are reporting that admins have started removing memes making fun of CEO Steve Huffman, as well as comments from angry Redditors repeating the “fuck u/spez” mantra (“spez” being Huffman’s username). They’re posting images of the ones that they claim are deleted. It’s unclear if those are actually being deleted or what’s going on, but Huffman has admitted in the past to editing comments that criticized him. And while he promised never to do it again and said he just did it out of frustration, I’m guessing he’s pretty damn frustrated right now.

Mods are continuing to fight back, and some are pointing out the ridiculous hypocrisy in all of this. For example, the mods of r/Canning (a subreddit for how to safely can food) said they received another threat from admins, and pointed out in response that they’re literally doing exactly what their community asked them to do, so to claim that they’re going against community wishes is bullshit:

We agree that subreddits belong to their community of users — and so when 89% of our users voted that we should blackout the community until Reddit backtracks on their current API access stance, we followed the communities request that we close shop.

The mods of r/Canning will continue to follow the wishes of our community first. If you wish us to make the subreddit public again, you will need to meet the demands of our users; to whit that you re-open discussion with 3rd party application developers, reduce your outrageous API pricing, and give them a minimum of 6 months before that pricing takes effect.

That is what the users have asked of us as their moderators. If you sincerely care about the “Subreddit belonging to the community of users” you will meet our demands, at which point we can discuss re-opening the subreddit. Should you prematurely force our subreddit public against the wishes of the vast majority of our users, our users will know the truth of the lie as to whom the subreddit really belongs.

In comments later in that thread, the mod from r/Canning points out that canning is a very tricky process, and done wrong can create real harm. They fear that if Reddit replaces them with mods who don’t know much, it could create real dangers. I’ve heard similar things from other mods of other subs as well. While certainly not all mods are perfect (many are far from), unilaterally dumping the most active ones and replacing them with corporate lapdogs creates real risks.

Or then there are the mods from r/PoliticalHumor who decided that if Huffman wants “democracy” rather than “landed gentry,” he’ll get it. They’ve made all members mods:

But, again, it’s incredible that someone needs to remind the dude who created Reddit how Reddit users react to any sort of threat to their way of doing things. Reddit is the place where the users don’t give a shit what you want. They want to fight for what’s right.

Perhaps Huffman is right that he’ll wait out his users. But I can’t see how any of this plays well for his investors, or how this speaks well of Reddit’s future as a community site.