While Reddit reopened Place on July 20 to relaunch the famous Pixel War, the same day the platform took over the moderation of r/malefashionadvice, one of the most important communities to oppose the new API plan.
The war may be raging on the canvas of r/place with motivated French Internet users, but it also continues to rage between the various communities and the management of Reddit. On July 20, Reddit took over R/malefashionadvice, a group for discussing men’s fashion and receiving advice. It is now u/ModCodeofConduct, in other words an employee of the Reddit administration, who is responsible for moderating the content.
Reddit takes over one of the biggest communities
5.4 million is the number of members of this subreddit created in 2009, one of the largest on the platform. Prior to the Reddit coup, R/malefashionadvice had gone private, protesting the API access cost reform, which has caused many third-party apps like Apollo to shut down for good. But Reddit forced its reopening, fired the old moderation team and called for new moderators by posting a message about the group on July 21.
According to several former moderators of r/malefashionadvice who testified to the American media The Verge, this takeover was expected: they would have received a message from the administration of Reddit telling them that if they did not reopen the subreddit imminently, they would be replaced by other moderators or moderators. The company does not seem to have hesitated to carry out this threat.
Other similar messages have been posted by the management of Reddit, for example on the group r/ShittyLifeProTips. The post has since been taken down by Reddit staff, after receiving both outraged and ironic comments: ” Good morning ! Would you like to volunteer to moderate this community? Free ? Keep in mind that if you complain about the way we treat you, we will remove you and find someone else”for example, wrote this Internet user.
Prevent Internet users from abandoning Reddit for Discord?
The protests from the r/malefashionadvice community have upset Reddit all the more as for several weeks, its moderators have been pushing members to migrate to other platforms like Discord. Shortly after the reopening of r/malefashionadvice by the administration of the community site, a user also managed to post a message urging other members to meet on Discord, with a link to the group’s community server. On July 24, this server had just over 7,000 members.
These protests come as the CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, nevertheless assured in mid-June in an internal note: “ Please know that our teams are on the job and like all outbursts on Reddit, this one will also pass. Faced with persistent resistance, this is not the first time that Reddit has decided to suspend the moderators of certain groups: at the end of June, r/TIHI and r/interestingasfuck had already paid the price after classifying their publications as NSFW content to have them demonetized.
This new turn of the screw by Reddit comes at a time when the social network has just reopened r/place and its famous canvas allowing Internet users to place pixels, giving rise to the Pixel War. A risky bet since some participants did not fail to use their pixels to protest against Reddit and its director, Steve Huffman, “spez” for nickname. Not sure, however, that this is enough to prevent Reddit from reopening the communities and ending the dispute that has been running for two months now.
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