Something big is happening, as Reddit seems to have purged literally every NSFW sub they know. Reason is always "unmoderated" despite some of the banned subreddits being fully moderated.
Edit: seems to have been a bug in automation (thanks @[email protected]):
https://old.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/1ii67mt/_/mb3fewv
It's still a good reminder on how quickly a community (or communities) thousands of people enjoy and in some cases rely upon can disappear.
This has been predicted for many years. Most were expecting it to happen before the IPO, since investors are afraid of porn.
They had also been gradually heading down this path for a long time, making porn harder and harder (heh) to find and view.
It's not only porn. Today i google-image searched a skin condition. Most results were reddit links, but i wasn't able to open any of them without their app as the subreddits were apparently 18+!
I wasn't able to view any of the information as i refuse to install the app. Google should deprioritize the results that can't be viewed in the browser.
You should still be able to navigate to those posts by changing the link to old.reddit.com. But I assume that will go away at some point too.
And the Firefox extension "old Reddit redirect" does it for you!
I love that extension
Or just switching to Show Desktop Site
In the top right of your internet browser, there should be a menu button. If you hit that, there should be a "Desktop Site" button. If you check that, the app prompt goes away. It's annoying that it's required, but at least you won't be locked out
Just request desktop mode, that bypasses it.
I know that trick, i just rarely use it and forgot about it 🤦♂️
It did happen before the IPO. It's been happening for several years. They have not been doing mass bans all at once. They've been surreptitiously taking down subreddits over the years. Mostly smaller ones that woujldn't draw much attetnion. Looks like they went for the bigger targets now.
This isn't a sudden change to ideologically align with the current US administration either. They have been at this for a long time.
Are they going to revert the changes in a few weeks when Musk loses interest? Seems like a huge loss of website traffic for some Elon virtue signaling.
It's only a matter of time. They don't display any ads on nsfw subreddits currently, so management likely sees these subreddits as nothing but a cost, especially because they tend to be heavily image/gif based. what they are unsure about, which is why they haven't been purged yet, is likely how much traffic to non-nsfw subreddits nsfw subreddits drive. I think we are likely to see purges of them when/if ad money dips or plateaus and they turn their eye to minimizing operating costs.