Reddit: Farewell to John Oliver, last bastions of protest give up

On Reddit, the last large sub-areas have also given up their protest and the platform has now won the dispute. Although more than 1800 of around 8800 subreddits are still not publicly visible, these are almost exclusively small sub-areas. Most recently, r/Pics, r/aww and r/Videos have given up guidelines to protest against those responsible for the platform – most notably that all shared pictures must show the British comedian John Oliver. Even if it had measurable consequences for the affected subreddit, Reddit would probably not have noticed, the moderators admit. Other sub-areas would have filled the resulting gap.

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No more John Oliver

A month and a half after the protests began, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman’s prediction has come true. In mid-June, he had assured internally that “like all riots on Reddit, this one will also pass”. Later he threatened the moderators who organized the protests, some were removed from their posts, Reddit took over the affected subreddits to a certain extent. With the last remaining bastions of resistance, that was apparently not necessary. While r/aww explains why it no longer requires shared content to feature John Oliver, on r/Pics the requirement has simply disappeared. It’s still on r/gifs, but it’s obviously no longer enforced. At r/Videos, things are looking the same as they did before the protests.

With the protests, parts of the Reddit community demonstrated against the platform’s decision to charge for API access. Popular third-party applications relied on the API, and due to the high cost and short notice, most have discontinued the service. Because many tools helpful for moderating the site are not available in the official app, the move has made the work of the unpaid moderators more difficult. In mid-June, they therefore organized platform-wide protests and in the meantime even made the site almost completely inaccessible. However, the management of Reddit had remained firm and has now prevailed, the protests are no longer visible on the platform.

In the course of the conflict, Huffman had described the moderators as democratically illegitimate “country gentry” and called the head of Twitter (now X), Elon Musk, a role model. Both had fueled the protests again. Then, in July, Reddit released a reboot of one of the most popular projects in the site’s history, r/Place. As in the original, r/Place consisted of an artboard and Reddit users could drop a colored pixel anywhere, after which they would be banned for several minutes. There were clear expressions of displeasure – up to the drawing of a guillotine – towards Reddits and the CEO Steve Huffman, but also messages of solidarity to the lost third-party apps.

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