Good on them. I hope others follow suit. As an aside, I recently switched to a lemmy app instead of using my ad blocked browser, and holy shit PCGamer’s website is an unusable dystopian nightmare. You have to read the article through a tiny letterbox of multiple competing videos and across the short article there are three full page ads to dismiss. Fuck that.

Here’s the full article text to save you a click.

If you want official updates from the Minecraft dev team, you better not look on Reddit. A post from a Reddit user bearing the name sliced_lime and a flair indicating they are the Minecraft Java Tech Lead (almost certainly Mojang’s Mikael Hedberg) announced yesterday that Mojang would no longer be posting official content to Reddit, in the wake of that platform’s response to protests over changes to its API.

“As you have no doubt heard by now, Reddit management introduced changes recently that have led to rule and moderation changes across many subreddits,” read the post, before announcing that those changes have led Mojang to “no longer feel that Reddit is an appropriate place to post official content or refer [its] players to”.

The events are only obliquely referred to in the post, but it seems the move has been sparked by Reddit’s crackdown on protests against recent changes to its API that would, in essence, kill off third-party apps that let users access the site.

Subreddit mods have spent the last few weeks mounting various campaigns against Reddit’s corporate leadership, either “going dark” by turning the subreddits they oversee into private, invite-only communities or else marking them as NSFW, meaning Reddit can’t sell ads on those pages. Reddit responded by pressuring disgruntled mods, and in some cases ousting and trying to replace them.

In practice, the biggest impact of this departure will be the end of the subreddit’s official changelog threads, where the subreddit’s 7.4 million Minecraft fans and players can pore over official updates in granular detail and offer their feedback directly to the devs who hang out there. Sliced_lime emphasises that players are, naturally, “welcome to post unofficial update threads going forward,” and can always “visit [Mojang’s] feedback site at feedback.minecraft.net” or else contact it via social media.

User reaction has been pretty understanding, which probably only highlights just how angry everyone is with Reddit’s leadership right now. The top-voted comment on sliced_lime’s post, from DamageBooster, just says “Understandable” before asking where else users can access official changelogs.

Still, even if there are other avenues to reach Mojang, it seems fairly dramatic for a game as incomprehensibly massive and significant as Minecraft to cut off Reddit as one of its official ports of call. It’s reminiscent of advertisers fleeing Twitter in the wake of Elon Musk’s messy assumption of leadership at that company. Time will tell if Reddit’s leadership will take any notice, though (I can’t say I’m optimistic).

I’ve reached out to Microsoft to ask if any more of its studios are going to follow Mojang’s suit and cut off Reddit as a source of official communication, and I’ll update this piece if I hear back.

For now, I think this is a one-off. There’s no sign of any other Microsoft studio doing anything similar so far, so this seems more like a situation that has personally aggravated sliced_lime (and presumably their fellow Mojang devs) than a Microsoft-wide initiative. But who knows? Perhaps one of the biggest companies in the world will take some time off fighting multiple national market regulators at once to direct its ire at Reddit executives. If that doesn’t get their attention, nothing will.

They have a cached copy of the content from before defederation. It’s a bit weird, but they can still comment and make posts in the zombie community, but the posts go nowhere. Only users from their own instance can see them, every federated instance sees the ‘true’ Beehaw content.

Thanks for a very enjoyable read. I’m a user-experience designer for web software and I’m absolutely baffled by modern product design. Fuck capacitive buttons and unnecessary screens.

Good design is problem solving. That means first it has to work, then it can be elegant and beautiful. Function before form.

I have a new stove that I already resent to heck after less than 3 months. I yell at it impotently multiple times a week. It’s a glass induction cook top with capacitive buttons on the top. To turn it on you have to press the power button, then the icon for the burner you want, then tap or mash a line with + and - icons multiple times to set the power. All that to replace turning a single knob on my old gas burner. The icons for the different heating elements have digital clock type displays to the left of them that light up with – if the thing is on, but TO the right of the last icon is another identical display so new users can’t tell which display is for which icon (turns out the last one is for the timer but it lights up and looks exactly the same as the others when the timer isn’t active and is spaced exactly the same distance from the last icon as the other displays). If you rest anything metal near the buttons it beeps incessantly. If it gets the slightest moisture on it it switches itself off and then beeps incessantly. I’m a patent person but whoever designed that thing deserves to spent the rest of their life in a void with only their own creations and a horseshoe crab for company.