Take Up Your Battle Stations, Redditors!

Reddit powermod Livody expresses his discontent over Reddit's API changes.

Dear Redditor, in such a gloomy hour on this platform, on behalf of all moderators of other subreddits, I come to you, humble and desperate. We have made our pleas to the admins. Those pleas have been ignored, perhaps entirely unheard. We have demonstrated peacefully. But those efforts have fizzled, while our disdain remains. And now I come to you all, not just to the Redditors of this subreddit, not just to Redditors who browse popular subs on the default app—nay, I speak now to the commoner of the entire internet. For it is not just our third party apps that have been made extinct. There is so much more at stake—much more than just our online communities of one website. Dear Redditor, this is a battle for the integrity and sanctity of the internet.

For those of you who hear my cry but do not know the cause for such despair, the Reddit admins, under guidance of a man who calls himself spez, have increased the price of their API access as of July 1^st, 2023. This means the labor of those who improve the platform with third-party apps will be cast into a void. Even if you browse on the standard app, or somehow have the stomach to endure “New Reddit” on a desktop browser with no additional plugins, this change will still effect you. The mods who work behind the scenes to deliver you clean, intentional, curated content have all developed a routine with browser extensions and third-party apps in order to deliver you this value. Shall your mods’ work be made more difficult or impossible, the experience of Reddit will erode.

We’ve already seen a seasoned user of over ten years burn his account to ashes in protest. His final and brief goodbye to us all is chilling: Thank you for everything. I’m deleting my 11 year old account. With such simple words, others have been inspired to join him, while I stare at my screen in despair and weep for the loss. Is this what the admins wanted? A mass grave of deleted accounts on their hands as they reach to grab another dollar of profit? When did the admins forget the human? Have they forgotten what kind of community they set out to create some eighteen years ago?

This is a platform where peer to peer expressionism has reached at times, if I dare claim, its utter ideals. Where no voice goes completely unheard. For here is a platform where, if someone feels no sense of community, they can start their own. This is how I came to love Reddit almost two decades ago, and indeed I started sixteen of the thirty-five subs that I now moderate, and I helped cofound several others that I have stepped down from. Sure, call me a powermod if you so choose—though I find the term derogatory. I earned this stature not with a desire for power but with a desire to build. My personal experience with Reddit is steeped in irony, in that I was first drawn to it because of its prominent community to promote atheism. However, seeing how the human soul can be fostered in these anonymous communities, I have come closer to knowing my own god than ever before.

What now, dear Redditor? Do we remain ever so apathetic and nullified by the short-term entertainment of memes and cat videos? Is this what the internet was destined to give our society, or is there something greater for us to create together? Will we stand together and fight more fiercely than ever before? The fight for Reddit is the crux of the fight for an internet that does not falter to the willpower of Big Tech behemoths. If we lose here, we have lost everything. We have let them drive their killing machines through our political sphere, all the way through our dilapidated rural communities, and now through our digital screens and into our most intimate spaces—with the algorithms that learn to predict what will garner our attention at any given second. We are letting them hack our psyche, and soon they will take control of how we think. We will soon be letting them control what we want to watch and eat. Does this not concern you, dear Redditor?

Let me ask you this, dear Redditor: who owns Reddit? In their effort to prevent us from locking the subreddits in protest, they’ve threatened to unmod us, claiming “subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation.” Such dreadful lies they threaten us with! While handing off the ownership of Reddit to hungry investors, ready to churn Reddit into a spez dispenser of advertising revenue.

But we shall not relent. We shall take their claims at face value. We shall embrace the notion that we the Redditors own this platform. We the Redditors remember the ideals of free expression and decentralization, the ideals which give promise of power for all, oppression for none. We shall fight for these ideals, first by clarifying who is driving the erosion, for he shall not be known as spez, nor the nickname that I am quite partial to: “K-Mart Elon Musk.” Nay, there is human flesh behind these treacherous decisions, and his name is Steve Huffman. Let it settle alongside that of Ellen Pao in the list of our failed leadership. Take up your keyboards and let his failure be known.

If nothing is to come of our efforts, then I too will go swiftly into the void, symbolically self-immolating my account by way of permanent deletion. I implore other mods to do the same. Let it be proven by our actions that this site cannot exist without our coexistence. And should we succeed in swaying the tides, we can return as reincarnated users, through the miracle of being able to make a new account.

Let the admins and their shills make a mockery of me, as if I’m not an honest working man who indeed touches grass every single day. Let me assure you now, before I am banned into silence: I have seen the top of the mountain—the tallest one in my state, at least—and it is not good. I can assure you that this is a fight worth having. Now is not the time to relent and remorse. Now is the time to fight—fight like everything worth living for is at stake, because it is. Thus I bid you good luck and Godspeed. Take up your battle stations, dear Redditors!