Hello!

You may have seen the recent news about the API changes Reddit intends to make. These changes are likely to impact 3rd party apps such as Reddit is Fun, Baconreader and Apollo, as well as potentially impacting plug ins such as Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) in future.

The mod team has been contacted about taking part in the planned protest against these changes by users of r/UKSwinging and people who are coordinating the protest. We decided to take a vote as a team about whether or not to take part. We have decided that the subreddit will go private on Monday 12th and Tuesday 13th June. The subreddit will look like this if you visit directly and will not show up in your home feed as nothing will be posted. We have decided to do this because:

• Making it harder for 3rd party apps to continue to function makes it much harder for us to moderate. Losing the functionality of 3rd party apps would mean that actions such as checking the mod queue, posting as a moderator and updating various things about the subreddit become more difficult due to do via the official app. A lot of the mod team here have been moderating for years and have settled on 3rd party apps because they are more user friendly.
• The moderators on r/UKSwinging with well over 75% of mod actions use 3rd party apps to do so. It is unlikely that everyone will migrate including the most experienced and long-standing moderators on the team, leaving us significantly shorthanded.
• Some subreddits say they're going dark because they love Reddit. That's not us, we just like this community a lot. We've never taken part in any Reddit-wide drama before because life is too short, but this would actively impact our ability to make r/UKSwinging as drama free (and un-Reddity) as possible.
• The change will affect how many users access the subreddit and Reddit as a whole. A significant portion of Reddit's userbase use 3rd party apps and would not make the move to Reddit's own app. This is particularly relevant for blind and partially sighted users who use IOS as Reddit's app is not accessible on that platform.

We did not ask the userbase because those who are engaged with the subreddit and Reddit generally are likely to be aligned with our thinking, and those who aren't probably won't care either way because the changes to the official app mean that users visit subreddits directly less often and rarely, if ever, engage with stickied mod posts. We think the biggest change if the API charges come into force would be seen in the change in moderation, hence us seeing this as a decision to be taken by us as a team.

Hopefully you understand our reasoning. We're not sure it will make a difference but we may as well give it a go, eh?