What we’re learning from the Reddit blackout

An illustration of the Reddit logo.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

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After a bruising week of protests and locked-down forums, things started to get back to normal Tuesday on Reddit, as — oh wait, what’s this?

A handful of subreddits have classified themselves as not safe for work (NSFW) to protest Reddit’s recent treatment of the platform’s volunteer moderators, and as a result, some non-porn communities are starting to get a lot of porn.

Subreddits that have made the NSFW switch include r/interestingasfuck, r/TIHI (Thanks I Hate It), r/formula1, r/videos, r/HomeKit, and r/HomePod.

As Jay Peters writes in that piece, designating forums as NSFW annoys Reddit Inc. in a...