TheMinecraftdevelopers at Mojang have decided to leave the game’s largest subreddit, having said as much in a viral post on June 27. Their announcement arrived mere days after the mainMinecraftsubreddit was flooded with John Oliver imagery.
Reddit is planning to enact a new developer policy on July 1 that will see it start charging third-party apps for access to its application programming interface (API). While the move itself was a long time coming, the exact contents of the policy changes prompted widespread protests across the platform, with many developers, moderators, and other users describing the company’s planned rates of $0.24 per 1,000 API requests as unreasonable at best and malicious at worst. A variety of popular third-party clients like Reddit is Fun and Apollo have decided to shut down once the new policy goes into effect, whilemany subreddits went privateor found other ways to protest the changes.
RELATED:Minecraft Player Adds Herobrine to the Game
The mainMinecraftteam has now opted to leave Reddit, citing this site-wide turmoil as the reason for their decision. As a result, the developers maintaining theJava Edition ofMinecraftwill no longer be posting the game’s changelogs on the platform. The team’s tech lead, Mikael “SlicedLime” Hedberg, explained that this was an internal decision from the staffers, so the move shouldn’t be interpreted as an official policy applying to the rest of Mojang, Xbox Game Studios, or Microsoft.
Minecraftfans on Reddit eager to share their opinions with the game’s developers following their departure from the platform can still do so off-site. To that effect, Hedberg recommended filling out a contact form available at feedback.minecraft.net.
Most fans reacting to the announcement expressed their approval of the move, whereas a select few speculatively framed the decision as a reaction to the loosening moderation of r/Minecraft implemented in protest of the impending API changes. However, Hedberg outright dismissed that notion, writing that “the moderators did not cause this” in response to one such theory. The developer also revealed thatMinecraft’sJava Edition team did not discuss the possibility of returning to Reddit should the platform roll back or tone down its planned policy changes, stating that they’d cross that bridge if they ever get to it.
The actual likelihood of that happening isn’t looking particularly high right now, not least because the site’s administrators spent the last several weeks cracking down on the protests with increasing ferocity. These efforts have most recently resulted inReddit starting to remove some of its moderatorsadamant to continue overseeing the public pushback against the impending API policy.
Minecraftis available for PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One, and legacy platforms.
