The ongoing Reddit saga is a trainwreck we just can’t stop watching since it affects not just the terminally online but a large body of MMORPG history and related communities too. Subs that have been protesting Reddit’s API changes, which the company had previously said weren’t even on the table for 2023 before giving plugin developers a month of notice before attempting to fleece them, have been deploying a range of tools to push Reddit executives to recognize the harm the API changes will do to users and subs; meanwhile, the CEO of Reddit has been on a press tour slandering app developers and trying to incite a class war between his own unpaid volunteer moderators and the users, who, you know, represent the actual humans doing all the work of being and maintaining the communities and content from which Reddit profits.
It’s been a dumpster fire, in other words.
Some subs have found their own way to protest – often with malicious compliance or work-to-rule philosophy, such as limiting the art and pics subs to images of John Oliver, all at the behest of their community voting, of course – and that includes the Guild Wars 2 subreddit. As of last night, that sub has reopened and is considering several options going forward.
“Reddit also made it clear in their threats that the subreddit community and not the moderators are the true owners of a subreddit, so in following other subreddits we are holding a poll to decide the future of r/GuildWars2,” the remaining mods say. There is no option to remain dark forever, largely because the mods don’t want to make years of key game info inaccessible, but gamers can vote to return to normal, to become a “Lord Faren Appreciation” sub, to convert to read-only, and to set the subreddit NSFW, which would be justified given the nature of the game – and also, not coincidentally, “deny Reddit the ability to generate ad revenue from the sub” under Reddit’s own rules.
It’s a ranked-choice vote, but right now, going NSFW is winning by a long shot, no matter which other options are removed. Voting continues through June 21st.
