Reddit is introducing a new rule, requiring moderators to seek permission to make subreddits private. Credit: Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty Images

Reddit is shaking up its rules to prevent moderators from taking matters into their own hands in the future.

On Monday, Laura Nestler, Reddit's VP of community, announced a major overhaul of the platform's Community Type settings rules in a post on the r/modnews subreddit. From now on, moderators will need to get the green light from Reddit before making subreddits private.

Community Type settings, typically controlled by moderators, determine a subreddit's visibility, switching between public view and restricted or private access. Moderators can also adjust these settings to change a subreddit's content rating from SFW (safe for work) to NSFW (not safe for work), limiting access to the group by age.

According to Nestler, in an interview with The Verge, Reddit has been mulling over this change behind the scenes since she joined the company in 2021.

“When a public community goes private, all redditors (even members of that community) lose access to the community and its content,” Nestler stated in the announcement posted on Reddit. “Outside of extenuating circumstances, communities should honor the expectations they set — public communities should remain accessible to all; private communities should remain private.”

New Rule Aims to Prevent Future Protests on Reddit

While Reddit may have been considering this change before last year's Reddit blackout protests, it's hard not to see this as a move to stifle future dissent.

In June 2023, thousands of Reddit communities, known as subreddits, changed their Community Type settings from public to either restricted or private in protest of the company's recent changes to its API. The Reddit API was once free for developers to build upon. However, the company decided to start charging for API access, which resulted in some popular Reddit-based apps like Apollo shutting down. You can learn more about the impact of this change on computerstechnicians.com.

Reddit eventually had to intervene and take over some larger subreddits to restore access to these communities. When a subreddit gets turned private, many users and visitors are completely cut off from viewing the content posted there. Some moderators who refused to comply with Reddit were removed from their moderator positions. It's worth noting that the role of moderator is generally not held by employees of Reddit. Moderator is a completely unpaid, voluntary position, and moderators are taken up by members of the Reddit community.

Reddit's governing body, comprising company employees, is responsible for reviewing and approving requests to modify Community Type settings.

Since its initial public offering on the stock market earlier this year, Reddit, now a publicly traded entity, has limited flexibility to accommodate community actions that could impact its traffic or revenue, as observed in 2023.

Revised Guidelines

According to Reddit, moderators are now required to submit a formal application prior to making their subreddit private or altering its age restrictions.

Beyond protest, a plausible reason for a swift Community Type change might be to avoid being overwhelmed by harassment in the event of a subreddit being targeted by trolls. This is a scenario that communities may be more susceptible to following this rule change. Some moderators expressed this concern in their responses to Reddit's rule change announcement.

“Our trans subs have been targeted by large, organized harassment campaigns in the past, sometimes for months on end,” one user wrote in the comments to Reddit's announcement. “Going private and manually checking and approving each applicant has been our primary defense for protecting our users, their photos, and their information.”

We reached out to Reddit for comment on this potential issue and for further information about the change in general, but we did not receive a response in time for publication.

Moderators can submit these requests at any time and will receive a response within 24 hours. Subreddits with fewer than 5,000 members, or those less than 30 days old, will have their requests approved automatically.

Moderators can still temporarily restrict posts and comments to a subreddit under its Temporary Events policy. Restrictions imposed on a subreddit by moderators due to a sudden surge in traffic will not require approval from Reddit. These restrictions under Temporary Events are permitted to remain for up to 7 days.

Regardless of Reddit's true motivation behind the new guidelines, the changes will likely not receive a positive response from moderators as Reddit removes a source of leverage these community members once wielded.