How we got here: Reddit
announced changes to API pricing with the sole purpose of killing third party apps(Apollo, RIF, Sync, Boost, etc).
/u/spez attempted to trick the wider Reddit community by spinning yarns about how the dev of Apollo threatened him, which was later
proven to be a lie and further lied when he stated that the
RIF dev never attempted to contact him.
/u/spez then had an
AMA where he doubled down and dismissed all legitimate concerns about the API pricing change.
Why we decided to join the blackout: From the outset we have known that our subreddit is an outlier amongst the wider Reddit community: We have a
large amount of third party app and old.reddit users. This is reinforced by
Reddit's own stats. We couldn't let an attack on a significant amount of our users go unanswered. This was
overwhelmingly supported in the post we made, before it even got to
/r/all and started to be influenced by outside voting.
What's going on now: After extending the blackout past 48 hours, we were contacted by the admin community team about our concerns and opened a conversation, which was our objective. However, Reddit is still steadfastly
refusing to negotiate. They are "speaking" to mod teams whose subreddits have indefinitely blackout and playing those mod teams against each other in bids to get them to re-open. In other instances they've threatened specific subreddits to re-open and a few are re-opening and turning into John Oliver fan subs (
/r/pics,
/r/gifs,
/r/art,
/r/aww).
Where does that leave /r/pcgaming?: We currently don't believe that Reddit has any intent in ever negotiating in good faith about this particular issue while
/u/spez is CEO. That leaves us with scant few choices.
If we continue the blackout we believe, based on reports from other subreddits, that Reddit will simply remove us as moderators and force the sub open anyway. They will put in place mods that don't understand the community, have no idea what kind of tools and SOPs we have created with our own time, money and experience, and may not ultimately serve the community well.
If we maliciously comply in re-opening---the thought was to become a Henry Cavill meme and pic sub---we would be destroying what this is subreddit is all about.
There is one thing that the mod team 100% agrees with Reddit on: We are stewards of this community. We take that responsibility very seriously. We wouldn't be doing this for free if we didn't. We have always tried to foster a place where anybody can come and share news and discuss PC gaming. All of the moderators on this team were regular users of
/r/pcgaming at one point in time and we have no desire to cause any long-lasting harm to it. With that said, we believe the best course of action is to re-open the subreddit at midnight EST on June 19th like we had planned.
We would like to end this post with an apology to our users who are going to be affected by these changes on July 1st: We're sorry. We tried to get Reddit to come back to the table but it's clear that Reddit doesn't care. You deserve better and hopefully you can find that if you decide you'd no longer like to be a Redditor. You will always be welcome in our
Discord.
