Reddit API Changes, what that means for /r/ValorantCompetitive, and Subreddit Blackout

Hi folks,

If you have not already heard about it, Reddit has announced that on July 1st, they are changing API pricing.

What this means, TLDR:

• 3rd party apps will become extremely expensive to run (the Apollo developer announced $20MM/year costs). This means that starting July 1st, most third party apps like Apollo, Boost, RiF, etc.. will shut down or start charging expensive subscriptions to keep up with the costs.
• The NSFW API is getting shut down. The only way to access content will be through the official app/website. What this means is that a LOT of moderation tools and practices that moderators use to keep their users safe will not continue to work.

Potential Impact on r/ValorantCompetitive

Now, you must be wondering what is the impact on this community.

ValorantCompBot & rib.gg bot

• no more rib.gg stats and PMTs
• no more upcoming matches in the sidebar
• no more Sentinels countdown
• Additionally, our new upcoming Pickems feature in collaboration with vlr.gg to replace Predictions (RIP), would likely never see the light of day.
  • We are working hard behind the scenes to make everything more automated, so that we could focus on what matters: making this subreddit a welcoming place for all Valorant esports fans. These changes would stop all of this effort.

Moderation

• The mod team uses a browser extension called the Mod Toolbox, and it uses the reddit API extensively. While reddit has said the mod toolbox will be safe, there is no assurance this won't change in the future.
• The official reddit app is not adequate for moderation. As of today, most of our mods use third party apps to moderate, which will disappear come July 1st.

Old reddit

While reddit has not talked about old reddit in a while, this change has made everyone scared for the survival of old reddit - which quite a few users, and most moderators on the website still use today.

Blackout

Folks at r/ModCoord have written an open letter detailing the moderator community's disapproval of the change.

Part of the initiative will be a Subreddit Blackout set to start on June 12th and go on until June 14th. Here is a list of participating subs.

While we know this hits right in the middle of Masters Tokyo, the API changes will impact our moderation team heavily. It is our goal to foster a community that is open and accepting, but that requires a certain level of dedicated moderation.

The changes will make moderating more difficult - comments will be stuck in queue longer, reaction to disruptive members will be slower, containing controversies that are not related to Competitive Valorant will be harder to achieve. Big events such as Masters Tokyo are a busy time for us as moderators and they bring a lot of traffic that ultimately needs to be looked at and examined carefully to ensure it fits with the community standards. Blacking out the sub is not just for our specific use case of the mod tools, but for the health of what we have established as acceptabe code of conduct with each other.

As moderators, we are unpaid volunteer and thus we have few tools to communicate with Reddit. While discussions happen in r/modnews, most complaints are lost on admins and we have little leverage to work with. By participating we hope to make it clear to Reddit that this will make moderation harder, and ultimately will make Reddit a worse place to build communities. This black out is a move in solidarity with every other community that values and believes that Reddit is it's communities, not it's investors - if moderators are not here to keep communities safe, and users can't share our passions, Reddit ceases to exist.

r/ValorantCompetitive will be participating in the blackout, and will go dark on June 12th.

What you can do to support this

We encourage you to participate in the blackout as users - for the duration, try to stay away from reddit as much as possible, especially if you are used to using a third party app. Stay off reddit.

Reach out to Reddit via the channels available to you: Modmail r/reddit, comment in relevant posts regarding the API changes, submit your comments via the contact forms.

Participate in the communities that highlight this issue: r/Save3rdPartyApps, r/apolloapp, r/redditisfun, r/getnarwhal/, r/ModCoord

---

Thanks for your understanding,

The r/ValorantCompetitive Mod Team