Many communities on Reddit have used the NSFW (Not Safe For Work) designation in some form to protest Reddit’s new API pricing, which forced apps like Apollo and rif is fun for Reddit to shut down, as well as a recent pattern of behavior toward its unpaid volunteer moderators that they find “threatening.” Subreddits, including r/PICS and r/military, had made the NSFW switch, pointing to language from Reddit websites to justify the change.
The moderators of the r/military community said they switched their label to NSFW because “military content has a chance to be violent content” and argued that “this subreddit should have been NSFW already, but we’d never thought to change it until recently,” according to a public post on Thursday.