Reddit announced last month that it was creating its own official Android app, giving users on the platform a solid option for browsing the website. Despite its Alien Blue acquisition a couple years ago, Reddit is also working on a new iOS app, something it will be putting into beta soon. Today’s all about Android, though, with the service announcing that the Android app entered beta today.
Yesterday the Oculus Rift VR headset was made available for pre-order for the first time in its final, consumer-ready form. The device cost is a cool $599 USD, a couple hundred more than the most recent developer unit. This is in contrast, it's now clear, with what many people assumed Oculus founder Luckey Palmer meant when he said the final consumer unit would cost somewhere in the "ballpark" of the cost of the dev kit.
Reddit has had an official client app on iOS for some time now, following its acquisition of Alien Blue in late 2014, but Android users have been stuck resorting to third-party apps or the mobile version of the website. Thankfully that situation is coming to an end soon. The company has announced that it's now working on an official Reddit app for Android, and it's already allowing users to sign up for beta testing via online survey.
The Turkish government seems to be continuing it crusade against internet platforms that enable the public to freely communicate, with the latest victim being Reddit. The entire site has been blocked in the country, with officials saying it violates Internet Law 5651, and users losing access sometime late Friday night. The law allows the government to ban websites found hosting "scandalous" content, including piracy, drugs, adult material, or criticism of Mustafa Ataturk, the nation's first president. However, it's not hard to imagine the law being used to censor criticism and free speech.
Reddit has decided to do away with shadowbans and replace them with suspensions, the company announced this evening. Shadowbans, for those unfamiliar, is a punishment for those who break the rules; users who have been shadowbanned can still post, but only they can see their content. In substitution, Reddit has introduced a new type of account restriction, one that “increase transparency when handling users who violate Reddit’s content policy."
Social aggregator Reddit has revealed it is launching its own news site, Upvoted, that will focus on presenting interesting news and media that surfaces from Reddit's own communities. The site is set to go live later today, and, most interestingly, will not allow any comments from readers or up/downvotes, as is the common practice on Reddit proper. As Wired reports, Upvoted will seem similar to most other news sites, presenting everything from stories, pictures/videos, infographics, and more, from a variety of categories including lifestyle, science, politics, technology, and sports.
If you spend any time on Reddit, you’ve likely seen the Russia drama unfold. Though the entire thing has been confusing, the timeline goes something like this: a Redditor published a post on growing drugs in Russian, and Russia didn’t like that. Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media watchdog, made a post on a Russian social network (more or less) asking that someone with contacts “with the Reddit administration” ask them to “check their email for messages” the agency has sent. If Reddit didn’t respond, Roskomnadzor said it may end up having local ISPs block access to the website.
The Russian government has said it's considering a nation-wide block on the social website Reddit over concerns about easily accessible information on growing and acquiring drugs. One government agency has said it's tried contacting Reddit about removing such posts, but they haven't gotten a response. Oddly enough, the government says it was prompted to take action because of complaints from users. Because surely people go right to the government when they see things on the internet, as this couldn't be a case of Russia wanting to censor information.
Reddit has finally banned several racist subreddits after having failed to do so during its recent content policy updates. Failure to ban the subreddits long drew criticism from users and non-users alike, and then continuing to leave them in place after going after other offensive communities led to harsh outcries from users. The existence of the subreddit and others like it were ended today, however, as the company just announced additional changes and new bans brought about because of them.
Reddit promised that changes were coming, and now those changes are here. In a post today, the site's back-again CEO Steve Huffman detailed some additional content restrictions the company is considering, and though they aren't too restrictive they will spell the end to a variety of subreddits -- some obscure, others well-known. Talking about illegal activities, for example, is still okay but posting illegal things is not. Bullying subreddits, too, are on the chopping block.
Reddit is undergoing a revolution and not everyone is happy about it. A short while after CEO Ellen Pao resigned and co-founder Steve Huffman returned, the site's chief engineer Bethanye Blount has decided to quit. She only spent two months in her role, having first worked for Facebook before transitioning to the "front page of the Internet". Her decision, she said, was not "directly linked to" Pao's exit from Reddit. Rather it seems the overall direction the company has taken recently took its toll.
This afternoon co-founder and once-again CEO Steve Huffman revealed an oncoming "comprehensive Content Policy and tools to enforce it." With this, said Huffman, the leadership team at Reddit hope to once again become the community they'd hoped it would be, one with content that is "wonderful, creative, funny, smart, and silly." Through this announcement, Huffman suggested that the management the website needs will be made possible with new tools for moderators, tools that they're developing now for the greater good of the whole community.