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The original was posted on /r/neutralpolitics by /u/nosecohn on 2023-06-29 15:59:20+00:00.

Dear users,

Over the past month, the moderator team of r/NeutralPolitics and our sister subreddit, r/NeutralNews, has done some soul searching about our future.

As a discussion platform, Reddit has been in steady decline for years. With the shift to mobile and the redesign, content that favors quick engagement and upvotes, continued scrolling, and serving ads seems to be winning out over the kind of text-heavy comment sections we favor here. Reddit admins have frequently promised tools and administrator engagement to improve moderation for subs like ours, and although there has been some progress, delivery often falls short. Reddit’s recent announcement about API access price hikes has pushed most third party apps out of business, which in turn has driven half our mod team off of Reddit. It’s been years of feeling like we’re swimming against the tide.

Nevertheless, the mods believe that the kind of environment we try to foster here has value for certain subset of internet users who are looking for evidence-based discussion of political and current events, so rather than shutting down the project, we’ve decided to seek out a new platform. The trouble is, none of the Reddit alternatives we’ve looked at are quite ready for us yet. They’re quickly maturing, but don’t currently provide the tools necessary to moderate this kind of environment with the small team we’re able to assemble. We’re following the latest developments on those platforms and will transition when we feel it is appropriate.

In the meantime, there’s a question about what to do with these subreddits while we’re waiting. r/NeutralPolitics and r/NeutralNews are currently “restricted,” meaning no new submissions are allowed, which diminishes the prevalence of comments and practically eliminates our content from users’ feeds.

Part of the remaining team thinks we should reopen (allow new submissions again) and place a kind of protest banner at the top of the subs (and perhaps stickied to each post) explaining our status, future, and reasoning. Others on the team believe it’s important for us to stick together with protesting subreddits, remaining restricted so that we can motivate Reddit to negotiate with the mod community over API pricing. Under that model, there’s a suggestion that we could follow the lead of r/AskHistorians and have mods post occasional content that keeps the subreddit alive, even while it remains blocked for user submissions.

Most of the third party apps are already gone and the pricing changes are due to take effect on July 1st, which is only a couple days away, so now is the time for us to make a decision. We’d like to incorporate user feedback in that choice. Eventually, we’ll be off Reddit, but in the meantime, what do you users think? Should we reopen or remain restricted?

Thanks.

— r/NeutralPolitics mod team