For those who don't know, retrogaming on Reddit was a labour of love, there is a multireddit, m/retrogamingnetwork that networks over 60 subreddits under one banner giving the audience, banner, and reach of a big subreddit to some very small and niche spaces.
I bopped onto the main subreddit to grab their discord link for https://sub.rehab/ and was amazed to see the sub open. There's a stickied post from "your new head mod" - they've made some changes already, ones that would stir debate if the userbase was still there to know about it: Reveddit Link
To quote the post opener:
First of all, you all know me probably at this point, but I’m Chalupacabra. We’re in the process of readjusting the mod team, so it’s not fully set up yet, but I’m your new head mod. It’s a process that’s been in the works for a bit now, I’m sure you’ve probably noticed some of the changes the team and I have put together to try to mix things up a bit based on what y’all told us you were interested in seeing.
And if there's any doubts as to what the community "were interested in seeing" we had voted 88% in favour of a total blackout.
On the one hand I'm glad I don't have anything to miss on reddit anymore, I'm not interested in being part of communities run by people more interested in themselves than anyone else, but it's sad to see something that should have died peacefully be zombified instead.
This is their current stance:
So the 48 hour blackout is over, and as promised the sub is back open, albeit in restricted mode. This means that we are not accepting new posts on this subreddit while we contemplate our next decision.
We feel as those Reddit has moved, but very slightly. Come the end of the month the API changes are still going ahead and all of the 3rd party apps will still suffer as a result, especially those that people can use to access Reddit.
So onto the main topic, what is wrong with the mobile app and why is access to other apps really that important? Surely it’s like Discord right? When you want to go on discord you just go on the discord app. There are no 3rd party discord apps at all.
Except Reddit existed for many years without an official app. In fact, the Reddit app you’re probably using to access this subreddit if you’re on mobile, was a third party app, known as Alien Blue See Wikipedia link here, that was bought and used by Reddit themselves.
The whole reason that the Reddit app exists was because of 3rd party apps that Reddit now intends to price out of existence, giving them less than 30 days notice to the impending changes. Reddit has had years to see something like this happening, it could have made suggestions for changes way back when Alien Blue became the Reddit app. But it didn’t. Instead it waited until now.
In addition, the Automoderator that every Reddit uses was also a third party app as well, something that I didn’t even know myself, having only been a moderator for the past two years, without Automoderator, modding even the smallest Reddit is nearly impossible. Our automod does the majority of the work for us, making sure that banned phrases, links to dodgy porn sites, spam content and everything else, don’t even make it to the comment section.
So now we sit and wait and see what happens, depending on how things move over the next few days will decide in what direction we will take r/history.