Reddit has attracted the ire of its moderators after introducing new staff powers which seriously hamper the userbase’s main method of protesting changes to the platform.

News and discussions site Reddit essentially functions as a collection of topic-based forums called ‘subreddits’, which are managed by volunteer users called moderators, or ‘mods’.

In a snap rollout on Tuesday, Reddit’s vice president of community Laura Nestler announced mods can no longer change their subreddits from public to private without first submitting a request for approval by a Reddit staff member.

When a subreddit goes private, its contents are no longer accessible to unapproved members of the public – meaning a sudden switch can make popular subreddits next to unusable for most users.

Last year, mods abused this feature en-masse during an unprecedented protest against the company’s decision to change its API pricing.

Taking nearly 8,000 subreddits offline and flooding subreddits with memes and images of John Oliver, the protests significantly hampered access to content both in-platform and for search engines such as Google.

Mods aren’t happy

While Nestler claims Reddit is vetting private mode changes for the sake of accessibility and community, mods were quick to call it out.

“Letting mods restrict their subreddits was never a problem until Reddit banned third party apps and caused an organised protest,” wrote user Ajreil, who moderates the 5.6 million member subreddit r/Frugal.

In an “elephant in the room” section of her post, Nestler said “protest is allowed on Reddit” as long as it doesn’t “cross the line into harming redditors” and the platform.

“We want to hear from you when you think Reddit is making decisions that are not in your communities’ best interests,” said Nestler.

“Don’t lie to us, please,” replied user CouncilOfStrongs, who moderates multiple popular subreddits including the 12 million member r/Fitness.

“Something that you can ignore because it has no impact cannot be a protest.

“No matter what you say that is obviously the one and only point of you doing this – to block moderators from being able to hold Reddit accountable in even the smallest way for malicious, irresponsible, bad faith changes they make.”

Protecting community or protecting revenue?

Notably, Google closed a content licencing deal with Reddit earlier this year which was worth a reported $87 million ($US60 million) annually.

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI soon after cut a similar deal with Reddit and multiple news outlets, enabling the company to access real-time content from discussions hosted on subreddits.

Using the anonymous pseudonym ‘Paul’, a prominent moderator told Information Age that factors such as search engine optimisation (SEO) and ad revenue are deciding factors in Reddit’s latest changes.

“Setting a sub to private absolutely f***ing annihilates Reddit's SEO,” Paul said.

“Reddit gets most of their traffic from Google.

“Suddenly changing a given Google user's access to searching ‘why does my cat meow so much?’ on r/cats is very bad for traffic, which is bad for ads.”

Notably, Reddit will also vet requests to make subreddits ‘not-safe-for-work’ (NSFW).

Although typically used to indicate sexually explicit content on a subreddit, mods often exploit the tag to muddy user accessibility and make community content ineligible for advertising.

“From a mod perspective, we both enjoy the traffic and want to flex our power when the collective “we” is upset at Reddit admins' decisions,” Paul said.

“But obviously the Reddit administration has an incentive not to allow that.”

Reddit won’t budge

A mod of the 31-million-member subreddit /r/pics (which was a prominent participant of last year’s protests) told Information Age that Reddit is likely “terrified” of a repeat protest, and its latest announcement could be a “sign of things to come” in regards to more controversial platform changes.

Nestler meanwhile told The Verge Reddit worked with mods ahead of announcing the latest changes, including a conversation with Reddit’s 160-strong mod council.

She said the response was “broadly measured” and that mods understood why Reddit is making the change “even if they don’t necessarily like it”.

“The feedback that was very obvious was this will be interpreted as a punitive change,” she said, adding the changes had been discussed internally since at least March 2021.

Reddit assured mods there are a few exemptions.

Communities can continue to instantly restrict posts and comments for up to seven days using ‘temporary events’ – a feature re-introduced in August to help manage communities during significant traffic spikes.

Furthermore, communities that have fewer than 5,000 members or have been active for 30 days or less will be automatically approved when submitting a request to go private.

Reddit said it will review non-exempt requests to make communities private or NSFW within 24 hours.

Paul added mods could still “flip a ton of switches” to “fuel another ‘reddit uprising’”, such as restricting new posts or disallowing users with certain letters in their username from posting.

“The knobs and levers for mods – especially of big subs – are vast and mostly untouched,” he said.

“[Admins] can bluster and be mad but they don't necessarily get to rule by fiat.’