First, to our community: we’re sorry that it had to come to this. This post explains why we’ve made this decision, so we’d like to take this as an opportunity to explain why this matters to us so much.

We love reddit. Not the company, but the community that’s able to exist here. This is a platform that has provided so many meaningful spaces to connect with others. Connecting to share, to entertain, to support, to find belonging. Sometimes to help too. Redditors are capable of doing great things when they come together. Redditors have raised money for countless causes, from r/freefolk raising over $130,000, to the dank charity alliance raising over $25,000 (with reddit support!) and so many more, contributed to the world’s largest secret santa gift exchange, r/askhistorians held actual historical conferences, and just so much more. To see the positive impact you, the users of this community, have had on people, look no further than updates where those that have posted share that firsthand. This is why we moderate, and why we pour countless volunteer hours into maintaining this space. We know reddit is capable of doing so much more good, which makes the recent failures of the company hurt even worse.

A big part of what makes this possible is the diversity that exists here. It’s the diverse people and communities on Reddit that make it unique. This means accessibility for everyone, and also the freedom to access and interact with reddit in different ways. There are diverse mod tools that support the diverse communities to customize their subs to do fun and unique things. Several of those tools are unavailable on mobile, unless you’re using a third party app. Without this diversity, Reddit would feel flat and boring. Or it could look like the comments here where you can’t meaningfully participate and bots dominate.

Feeling lucky? See if automod thinks you’re the asshole. Comment “AITA?” on this post. Nothing more, nothing less. Automod will give you your verdict. Do these answers feel completely unrelated to your concerns? We know how that feels. This is the future of reddit if the underlying issues that lead to these poor decisions aren’t seriously addressed.

Why did we set the sub restricted rather than private? In both cases no one is able to post, but setting it to private means that anyone that hasn’t been following this closely won’t know why. Users already aware and participating in the protest won’t be using reddit during this period anyway. We thought it best to continue to use our platform to increase visibility of the issues we're facing