Users of AS:F,

We're around the fourth week of protest action against changes to Reddit's API policy that will harshly impact 3rd party operations, including operations that support visually impaired users. While the impact this would have was originally hypothetical, it has grown far less so; volunteers at r/transcribersofreddit have announced that they will halt operations, as the API changes have effectively scuttled plans to support their volunteer efforts with bespoke 3rd party software, and r/blind is reporting that their visually impaired moderators are incapable of actively moderating with Reddit's native software. Other major blowback includes large scale loss of moderators, both voluntarily due to mods quitting in frustration and others getting purged for attempting to press on with the protest.

As is stands currently, just a bit over 2000 subreddits remain blacked out, out of a peak of 8.8k who said they'd shut down for at least 48 hours, and around 6k during the initial week. This is, needless to say, quite the drop. But at least anecdotal evidence suggests that there is an impact; no doubt if you've been cruising around on other subs, you've noticed a significant spike in "your ad here" style ads in lieu of actual, paying product.

Once again, we are going to open it up to the users to decide how we proceed. Last time, concerns were expressed about the number of voters we were able to bring in, the visibility of the poll, and the transparency of the poll itself. To this end, we are making some adjustments to the procedure.

First, instead of a poll on Reddit, we will be using Strawpoll. One doesn't need to sign up to use it. The poll is set to automatically close as 12AM UTC on Monday the 17th (roughly 8PM Eastern Standard/7PM Central on Sunday in the U.S.A.), but will remain up and visible afterwards.

Second, for the duration of the poll AS:F will return to open operation, with regular announcements about the poll, and the automod flagging all questions with a link to the poll. This should greatly increase AS:F's footprint on people's feeds and home pages, and combined with the longer duration should give a more authoritative sample.

Third, our sister subreddit What If: Fiction will also be included in this poll and the restoration to open operation during the poll; the results of the vote will impact both.

For this poll, we are only examining the question of reopening versus going back into shutdown for another week. If the vote is in favor of a shutdown, we'll go dark for another week and reopen for a fresh poll after. If the vote is in favor of resuming operations, we will keep the sub open and prepare a new poll to consider what, if any, protest action we will engage in moving forward.

In the meantime, the Discord is up and running, and can be found here: https://discord.gg/wKymkPD4JD

-Vote_for_Knife_Party