The largest Reddit community still private as part of the Reddit protest is now encouraging its users to congregate elsewhere: Discord and Substack.
If you are currently trying to visit r/malefashionadvisewhich has over 5 million subscribers, you will be greeted with a page suggesting you visit the community site Discord And Sub-stack instead. r/malefashionadvice was a great resource for conversations and fashion guides, and Discord and Substack offer alternative homes for these resources. Specifically, the Discord allows community members to chat with each other and post information such as tweaks and inspiration, while the Substack hosts a plot of guides.
Screenshot by Jay Peters/The Verge
“One of the other mods writes ‘I’ll never go back, it’s way better on Discord,’ and that sentiment is pretty mixed,” the mod, who asked to go through Zach, said in an email. email to The edge. “The community does a much better job of self-moderation, largely because the ratio of existing regulars to new people is currently extremely high.”
The substack is not intended to “be a subscription-based thing”; instead, it was a good place to bring subreddit guides and maintain formatting, Zach says. The greatest guide, Build a basic wardrobeis at over 2,000 views coming “almost entirely from Discord.”
That said, Discord and Substack are both much smaller than r/malefashionadvice’s subscriber base: Discord has over 2,000 users, while Substack has almost 560 subscribers.
Reddit and many of its larger communities have been at odds over new API pricing that forced some popular third-party apps to shut down. At the height of the protest in mid-June, more than 8,000 communities were private, but since then many have reopened, with some doing so after Reddit informed mod teams they would be taken down if they didn’t reopen. not.
Reddit is apparently not happy that r/malefashionadvice is still private. On Thursday, the subreddit moderators received the following message from a Reddit admin (employee) telling the team that they would be replaced if they didn’t reopen the community:
Hello everyone
You are receiving this message because your community has been closed for over a month.
If you are interested in actively moderating this subreddit, please reopen it and reply to this modmail within the next 3 days to outline your plans for the future.
If we don’t have an answer, we will remove your moderator status and form a new team of moderators.
In response to the admin, Zach wrote that the team is actively monitoring and addressing content in their moderation queue and moderation messaging system. Zach added that the community has only been closed for 13 days.
(In June, the subreddit reopened after being shut down, but only allowed posts about menswear from the 1700s after the community voted for the change. The mods quickly brought the community back to the private side, we realized a better way to make an impact would be to go private again indefinitely,” says another mod, who asked to go through Walker. The edge.)
Despite the message, the moderation team plans to stick around until they are removed. “We expect to be removed from (r/malefashionadvice) as a mod team relatively soon based on admin communications,” Walker wrote in a Discord post. “We would like to take this moment to thank everyone who has put in so much time and effort over the submarine’s nearly 14-year history.”
If Reddit installs new mods that reopen the community, Zach thinks that while many people will return, “most of the regulars probably won’t return,” he says. “Dozens of bots (and human bad actors) plague (r/malefashionadvice) daily, and without the proper modding tools it will be even harder to keep them out.”
Reddit did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Other communities are continuing their protests in other ways. r/AccidentalRenaissance, a subreddit focused on images that look like Renaissance paintings, is now private after its moderators have resigned and encourages people to join derivative communities on Reddit alternatives kbin And Lemmy. r/PICS, which only allows posts about comedian John Oliver, asks Oliver himself to join the moderation team. (Warner Bros. Discovery did not immediately respond to a request for comment asking if it would.)
Over 2,000 subreddits are still dark in protest, according to the Reddark tracker.
