Mojang’s dropping its official support of the Minecraft Subreddit

Minecraft’s subreddit is losing its official support from Mojang, and Reddit’s management is to blame

Mojang has officially confirmed that they are shutting down their official Minecraft subreddit, a place where Mojang offered support to gamers, discussed the future of Minecraft, and allowed the community to directly interact with developers. While r/minecraft will remain available as a place for unofficial discussions and threads, the subreddit will no longer be supported by Mojang, and players have been told to reach out to Minecraft’s developers in other ways. 

At the time of writing, Reddit is undergoing the largest community protest in its history, a protest which started due to the controversial changes that the company has made to its API policy. To make a long story short, Reddit wants to profit from applications that make use of the Reddit API, an API that has been free to use for over a decade. Because of these changes, many prominent Reddit communities have temporarily closed their pages in protest. In total, around 8,000 subreddits are believed to have been closed indefinitely.

Currently, access to the Reddit API is free for users, a factor that has enabled the creation of several 3rd party Reddit apps, which many users prefer to use instead of official Reddit apps. 

Below is Mojang’s statement regarding this dropping of official support for the r/Minecraft subreddit. 

    As you have no doubt heard by now, Reddit management introduced changes recently that have led to rule and moderation changes across many subreddits. Because of these changes, we no longer feel that Reddit is an appropriate place to post official content or refer our players to.

We want to thank you for all the feedback and discussion you’ve participated in in past changelog threads. You are of course welcome to post unofficial update threads going forward, and if you want to reach the team with feedback about the game, please visit our feedback site at feedback.minecraft.net or contact us on one of our official social media channels.

It is no secret that Reddit management wants it to become a publicly traded company, a move that could attract huge levels of investment and make a lot of money. So far, Reddit’s move towards an IPO (Initial Public Offering) has been slow, and Reddit’s planned API changes are designed to make the company appear more profitable. With their planned API changes, Reddit plans to move more users to the site’s official app (which contains ads), generate a small income (from those who will pay for API access), and reduce the company’s costs (as there will be fewer people using the Reddit API). So far, all Reddit’s API plans have done is cause many of the website’s most popular subreddits to go dark, and disgruntled a large portion of the site’s userbase.

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