Steam Time
Hey, you know water, right? Funny little liquid, that one. Does some wacky and wild stuff when the temperature changes too much. Like, it gets too cold, and the whole thing just freezes up! But be careful while thawing it out, because it might get fed up with you and fly away as a gas. Yeah, water can fly! Isn’t nature wonderful? And you can use that flying water to power stuff! Anyway, some users at the Steam subreddit were out touching grass and made this discovery. They brought it back to their compatriots, and everything changed.
Or, more accurately, the Steam subreddit is joining in a large-scale protest against Reddit’s new API changes. Or, more accurately, they’re responding the the fallout from a protest that already happened, one that Reddit’s higher-ups are currently trying to overcome. Or, more accurately, this is just a whole big mess and we have to start from the top.
One day, Reddit decides to make some changes to their website. Big ones. Ones so big that a bunch of programs that use reddit’s data (typically to make moderation easier or to make the site more enjoyable) will cease to function. The site’s moderators hate it, users hate it, everyone hates it, so they decide to do something about it: destroy Reddit. Moderators, with community support, shut down their own forums in collective protest. They also, collectively, publicly declared that this protest would last only 48 hours. Oops.
Reddit said “ok” and didn’t really care that much. When reopening time came and nothing changed, some subreddits decide to stay closed indefinitely and prolong things. Reddit said “no”, and promised to take control away from forums that don’t reopen. Many reopened, but did not forget their prime directive, and instead transformed their forums into something unusable. r/art contains only images of John Oliver, r/Interestingasfuck is “not suitable for advertisers”, and r/Steam LOVES steam. The gas. Not the Steam gaming platform. That’s how you get posts like this: