Yesterday we told you that a hacker group called BlackCat demanded $4.5 million from Reddit and a reversal of its recent API usage policy changes in exchange for not publishing private data it stole earlier this year in a phishing attack. Well, if you thought that was the most unusual thing to happen on Reddit this week, you were wrong.
In a clear “upping the ante” move, many subreddits have adopted the NSFW (not safe for work) category, which includes all those communities where adult content can be uploaded. And, unsurprisingly, users of these communities have started to flood these subreddits with porn.
While many might think that this is a trolling, the background of this action is much more serious. A few days ago, thousands of Reddit communities with millions of followers “shut down” in protest against the latest changes made by Reddit, which basically put a price on the use of its API to app developers, and not a cheap one at that.
Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, seems to be following in the footsteps of Elon Musk when it comes to making money any way you can, even if it earns you the hatred of the community, and disregarded the pleas of developers and Reddit’s own moderators, who use many of these apps to maintain order on the platform. Huffman, who seems to have no idea how his own platform works, went so far as to call moderators “landed gentry” in a recent interview with NBC, earning (even more) scorn from these users.
As a new protest measure, moderators of popular communities such as r/formula1, r/Homekit, r/interestingasfuck and r/videos have made these subreddits NSFW. An action that has not only led to porn everywhere, but also forces mobile users to log into the Reddit app if they want to view such subreddits. No doubt this will end up “heating up” more than one Reddit boss.
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