Reddit

“Starting today, inactive moderators won’t be able to perform certain actions, including adding or removing moderators, or changing the community’s settings (type, description, NSFW status, discovery settings),” Reddit says. These seem like good changes!

It’s adding a “Mod Helper Program,” trophies and flair for users in r/ModSupport, an answer bot to help mods find Help Center articles, and a forthcoming merger of the platform’s Mod Help Center and the main Help Center. Some mods haven’t been particularly happy with Reddit as of late, so efforts like this and its mod roadshows could help Reddit regain some trust.

They’ll be taking place through the rest of the year. There will also be a virtual Global Mod Summit on December 2nd. Reddit has had a rocky relationship with some mods because of the recent protests, so perhaps these events will help thaw some of that ice.

Reddit had announced a loose schedule for the roadshows in July. At the time, it also invited people to participate in an accessibility feedback group, though moderators of r/Blind said last week they won’t be joining it.

The developer of Narwhal 2 is now in beta, and you can read more about it on the r/Apple subreddit and sign up for the beta on the app’s website. Like some other third-party apps, Narwhal 2 will have subscription tiers at some point down the line.

Many mods relied on now-shuttered third-party apps for moderation, so maybe this new desktop experience will prove to be a good enough way for those mods to do their work.

A federal court has ruled that Reddit won’t have to reveal the identities of users that openly discussed torrenting on the platform, Gizmodo reports. As with a similar decision reported in May, the judge ruled that the First Amendment’s right to anonymous speech is more important.

The identity verification service no longer seems to be able to verify identities on Reddit — at least, not for me and a handful of others who have tweeted about it. I’m guessing this is because of Reddit’s change to start charging for API access.

On the other hand, it could be because Zoom, which bought Keybase in 2020, seems to have mostly stopped updating the service. On iOS, it’s only gotten a single bug fix in the past year.

The company announced its fourth series of Collectible Avatars on Wednesday. Reddit is putting some limits on who can buy them for the first day of launch as part of an “initial access” period.

Reddit first released Collectible Avatars last year, and they could be a way for Reddit to bring in some money as it tries to make a profit.

The collective project is ending soon, and users can only write in white, but they’re working on one last piece of protest art to send r/Place off. (Smaller versions of the message have been dropped in throughout the multi-day event.)

We’ve captured the final moments of r/Place in the gallery below.

There are some positive updates — including the creation of a new email address to report accessibility issues — but overall, the moderation team still seems very dissatisfied. r/Place, for example, is “not blind, low-vision or even keyboard accessible.”

Recently, all of Reddit’s free iOS app icons were ugly — the default became a pixelated version of the usual logo seemingly to promote r/Place — but as of a new iOS update available Monday, the app icon is back to its usual, non-pixelated look.

On a perhaps related note, Reddit said Monday that its latest r/Place expansion would be the last one, so the collaborative art project might be wrapping up soon.

Reddit has expanded the collaborative canvas multiple times since it first launched on Thursday, and while a lot of the protest art and messages have been largely buried amongst the many other designs, users are making a renewed push on a new section with a giant message cursing CEO Steve Huffman. “Targeted hate and harassment” are against the canvas rules, so I’m guessing the new message might not stay up for very long.

There is some legitimately awesome art on this year’s board, including an impressive recreation of the classic Charizard Pokémon card.

Apollo app developer Christian Selig dropped new wallpaper art of a cute hybrid of Clippy and the Reddit alien today.

Selig has been hawking fun wallpapers for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS via the Apollo app since Reddit started down a dark path of hostile changes earlier this year and Selig shuttered the popular third-party Reddit client. He’s also selling the wallpapers outside the app.

And the German flag apparently expanded to fill the new space within under three minutes. How did they do it? According to Redditor HellsOnWheels45, a Discord server with 50,000 users in active coordination.

Also, protest messages have made a comeback on r/place after largely disappearing by Friday evening, with more “fuck spez’ messages near the center of the canvas.

The moderators said they kept the sub private to protest Reddit’s API pricing after a community vote. But after getting some messages from the ModCodeOfConduct admin account pushing them to reopen, one mod said Friday they were removed from the subreddit.

“Please don’t feel bad for us — in the end, the ones being hurt here are Reddit itself and the r/Canning community,” the moderator wrote.

The community now open again, in restricted mode, and under the sole management of ModCodeOfConduct, like what I reported about r/malefashionadvice on Thursday. ModCodeofConduct is also the only moderator of r/homeautomation.

Even though the canvas is littered with messages cursing CEO Steve Huffman, Reddit still posted a video of its evolution. If Reddit decides to take the video down, I’ve been adding screenshots of the canvas throughout the day to this article.

The more than 300 subscribers on r/PlaceAPI are batting around ideas for protest art for the 2023 r/Place canvas that’s launching on Thursday.

In Reddit terms, that’s a comparatively tiny community, but they’re not the only ones thinking about how to use r/Place to share their discontent: a lot of people on Reddit’s announcement post are discussing ideas, too.

At Fast Company, Katie Notopoulos takes a deep dive into the Palantir meme-stock community:

One person in the Palantir fan Discord quipped, “Next time someone says Pili is a vampiric data-stealing, Trump-backing, AI-imposter, secretive-data-selling spytech company, you can say, ‘Sir, I object, it’s a vampiric data-stealing, Trump-backing, AI-imposter, secretive-data-selling spytech HUMANITARIAN company.’”

The stonk market is alive and well, I guess.