Open APIs and third-party clients are paramount to enabling privacy-friendly access to otherwise proprietary silos on the web. Through the use of those APIs and clients, it was possible to interact with Reddit in an entirely user-controlled, privacy-friendly way. Reddit’s restrictions take that choice away, making their official app virtually the only portal to the information on their platform available to mobile users.
Over 5,500 other subreddits have also switched to private mode in the last few hours in protest of various issues surfacing at Reddit.
I hope that these communities stay private until Reddit actually responds properly to this situation. Call me cynical but I don’t think they are going to back down on their decision, they stand to gain too much and I bet people will forget about this in a month or two
