Enlarge / Left: Reddit's old logo. Right: Reddit's new logo. (credit: Reddit )

Writing a long comment providing detail about Reddit's refreshed logo, mascot, and typeface this week, a Reddit employee seemingly rethought the post and opted to conclude it with choice words. The post's last line currently reads:

"Edit: Obligatory 'Fuck Spez' for karma."

The Reddit employee, going by Acidtwist on Reddit and known as Tavish, says they're Reddit's head of brand creative (Reddit says it doesn't disclose the real identities of its workers on Reddit).

Enlarge (credit: Getty )

Reddit is campaigning to replace numerous longstanding moderators who were removed from their positions after engaging in API protests. Over the past week, a Reddit employee has posted to subreddits with ousted mods , asking for new volunteers. But in its search, the company has failed to address the intricacies involved in moderating distinct and, in some cases, well-known subreddits. And it doesn't look like the knowledge from the previous moderators is being passed down.

Redditors were enraged over suddenly high API access pricing, and the social media platform's subsequent responses to protests and feedback have beleaguered Reddit for weeks. A two-day blackout of over 8,000 subreddits, for example, shut Reddit down for three hours in June. Protestors complicated matters further with moves like suddenly making subreddits not-safe-for-work (NSFW), all about John Oliver, or focusing on some unhelpful tweak of its original topic (like r/malefashionadvice only allowing posts related to the stylings of the 18th century).

It's a tough job...

Reddit's response has included threatening to remove moderators who are engaging in protests to actually removing them. Recently, efforts to replace the departed volunteers who were booted or quit have picked up steam. A Reddit employee going by ModCodeofConduct (Reddit has refused to disclose the real names of admins representing the company on the platform) has posted to numerous subreddits over recent days, including r/IRLEasterEggs , r/donthelpjustfilm , r/ActLikeYouBelong , r/malefashionadvice , and r/AccidentalRenaissance .

Enlarge / There could soon be much more of this on Reddit. (credit: Getty )

The Reddit community is still reckoning with the consequences of the platform's API price hike. The changes have led to the shuttering of numerous third-party Reddit apps and have pushed several important communities, like the Ask Me Anything ( AMAs ) organizers, to reduce or end their presence on the site.

The latest group to announce its departure is BotDefense. BotDefense, which helps removes rogue submission and comment bots from Reddit and which is maintained by volunteer moderators, is said to help moderate 3,650 subreddits. BotDefense's creator told Ars Technica that the team is now quitting over Reddit's "antagonistic actions" toward moderators and developers, with concerning implications for spam moderation on some large subreddits like r/space.

Valued bot fighter

BotDefense started in 2019 as a volunteer project and has been run by volunteer mods, known as "dequeued" and "andabrownn" on Reddit. Since then, it claims to have populated its ban list with 144,926 accounts, and it helps moderates subreddits with huge followings, like r/gaming (37.4 million members), /r/aww (34.2 million), r/music (32.4 million), r/Jokes (26.2 million), r/space (23.5 million), and /r/LifeProTips (22.2 million). Dequeued told Ars that other large subreddits BotDefense helps moderates include /r/food, /r/EarthPorn, /r/DIY, and /r/mildlyinteresting.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | natatravel)

Reddit is fighting another attempt by film companies to unmask anonymous Reddit users who discussed piracy.

The same companies lost a previous, similar motion to identify Reddit users who wrote comments in piracy-related threads. Reddit avoided revealing the identities of eight users by arguing that the First Amendment protected their right to anonymous speech.

Reddit is seeking a similar outcome in the new case, in which the film companies' subpoena to Reddit sought "Basic account information including IP address registration and logs from 1/1/2016 to present, name, email address and other account registration information" for six users who wrote comments on Reddit threads in 2011 and 2018. Reddit wrote in a court filing on Wednesday :

Enlarge (credit: Tim Goode/PA Images via Getty Images )

If you've been worried about how you're going to upload explicit images from your desktop to Reddit after Imgur's ban and purge takes place May 15, you can now rest easy. On Thursday, Reddit started allowing not safe for work (NSFW) images to be uploaded from desktops to communities limited to users ages 18 and up, as spotted by TechCrunch .

"This now gives us feature parity with our mobile apps, which (as you know) already has this functionality," Reddit's announcement on the r/modnews subreddit says.

As of May 15, image-hosting site Imgur will no longer allow nudity, pornography, or sexually explicit content and remove any images that fall under that umbrella.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Reddit doesn't have to identify eight anonymous users who wrote comments in piracy-related threads, a judge in the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled on Friday. US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler quashed a subpoena issued by film studios in an order that agrees with Reddit that the First Amendment protects the users' right to speak anonymously online.

The First Amendment right to anonymous speech is not absolute, but the precedent followed by US district courts only forces disclosure of anonymous users' identities "in the exceptional case where the compelling need for the discovery sought outweighs the First Amendment rights of the anonymous speaker," Beeler noted. After reviewing the facts and arguments, she found that the Reddit users' comments were irrelevant to the film studios' underlying case and that the studios could obtain relevant information from other sources.

Reddit has no involvement in the underlying case, which is a copyright lawsuit in a different federal court against cable Internet service provider RCN. Bodyguard Productions, Millennium Media, and other film companies sued RCN in the US District Court in New Jersey over RCN customers' alleged downloads of 34 movies such as Hellboy , Rambo: Last Blood , Tesla , and The Hitman's Bodyguard .

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

A year after Reddit updated its policy on non-consensual intimate image (NCII) sharing—a category that includes everything from revenge porn to voyeurism and accidental nip slips—the social media platform has announced that it has gotten much better at detecting and removing this kind of content. Reddit has also launched a transparency center where users can more easily assess Reddit's ongoing efforts to make the platform safer.

According to Reddit’s 2022 Transparency Report —which tracks various “ongoing efforts to keep Reddit safe, healthy, and real”—last year Reddit removed much more NCII than it did in 2021. The latest report shows that Reddit removed 473 percent more subreddits and permanently suspended 244 percent more user accounts found to be violating community guidelines by sharing non-consensual intimate media. Previously, Reddit labeled NCII as "involuntary pornography," and the 2022 report still uses that label, reporting that the total number of posts removed was 187,258. That includes non-consensual AI-generated deepfakes , also known as “lookalike” pornography.

“It’s likely this increase is primarily reflective of our updated policies and increased effectiveness in detecting and removing non-consensual intimate media from Reddit,” the transparency report said.

Enlarge (credit: Marvel)

Marvel is seeking the identities of Reddit and Google users involved in the leak of dialogue from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania . Marvel says that before the Ant-Man film's release, movie dialogue was leaked in a Google Docs file and that the link to the document was posted in a Reddit thread.

Marvel on Friday asked a federal court to issue Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) subpoenas to both Reddit and Google demanding the identities of people allegedly involved in the pre-release dialogue reveal, including Reddit moderators whom Marvel suspects of being behind the leak. The requests were filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The Google document was deleted after Marvel owner Disney filed a copyright complaint to Google. The link to the Google document was also deleted from the Reddit thread. But Marvel still wants to find out who posted the Google Doc and who shared it to Reddit.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg )

Before it was updated last month, Discord’s privacy policy specifically promised to alert users “in advance” if the company ever started storing contents of video calls, voice calls, or channels. That’s why some users became alarmed when the latest updates—which go into effect March 27—seemed to quietly drop this promise. One Discord user asked Ars to investigate, wondering, “Does Discord plan to retain call recordings?”

According to a Discord spokesperson, the answer is no.

“There has not been a change in Discord's position on how we store or record the contents of video or voice channels,” a Discord spokesperson told Ars. “We recognize that when we recently issued adjusted language in our privacy policy, we inadvertently caused confusion among our users. To be clear, nothing has changed and we have reinserted the language back into our privacy policy, along with some additional clarifying information.”