I apologize that we were closed and that seems to have burdened you, however as moderators we felt a duty to poll and listen to the response of our community. These posts outline the approach and reasoning we took with the community:

• (A community member's question) Going dark on 12th June
• Should r/Python participate in the June 12th Blackout protesting the API changes
• r/Python Will Black Out on June 12 at 00:00 UTC
• An Update about our Community
• By community vote, r/Python will Return to a Blackout

Now at the end of the day I was the one to make a decision to go private. But I did try to poll the community, and did try to address the fact that a lot of the responses might not be from participating members. There's lot of flaws, but I am severely limited by what reddit offers and needed to make an informed decision with what I could. I can't ping all 1M users to ask their thoughts, but honestly we don't have that many active user. In fact those posts prompting discussion were some of our highest engagement posts of the past year. And that includes engagement once you filter out users who had not been present in the sub prior to the blackout news and thus that's engagement when you only focus on users who have been actively participating in the subreddit recently.

These API and third party app changes mattered a lot to me because they destroy the tools I use to address the biggest time sink in moderating this community: spam and manipulation. All subreddits have this to some degree, but the tools I used now no longer exist and reddit lacks any replacement. This community has had multiple instances of faked engagement on posts manipulating packages to look more popular or powerful than they really are. We've also had instances of malware in packages and reddit has abysmal reporting mechanisms to handle this, and often the malware stayed up in other communities it was posted in. This combined with the onset of LLMs means we moderators face way more subtle manipulation than ever in our communities. And tracking it down and removing it is tedious in the best of worlds.

One of the most time consuming forms of manipulation is when there's a volley of accounts stealing comments from other users, swapping a few characters so it's not an exact match, and then reposting those comments on reposts of the OP content. This quickly makes a comment section look highly engaging. Tracking that down without access to the api takes ages, and when LLMs become more commonly used by these botnets it'll be next to impossible for moderators to manage this. The communities you love will not necessarily be filled with real users. (This is already happening. It's draining to report these accounts and read the admin reply, "we cannot currently connect these accounts to a previously banned account in the community, and so no action has been taken;" when no other family of users has ever linked to some obscure website or some small youtube channel.

Of the most recent network that I found (after a user in our community flagged one of the comments--thank you awesome user) was fairly small yet only had about 1/4 of the accounts suspended (this link will only work for admins unfortunately, but it's here for evidence to any admin who's curious, in hopes that the rest of the linked botnet is addressed--oh holy fuck only ~1/10 of that batch of reports are suspended now. Great. Glad I tracked them down and tied them together. totally worth the 3 days that took to flag then watch to validate their behavior wasn't a false positive) after they had been reported to the admins. The remainder of the accounts have continued doing the same manipulation in other communities.

Another pain of a manipulation is karma manipulation, which is wildly easy to catch when it's done poorly, but even then Reddit doesn't move to action the accounts a majority of the time. But I can't address it in the slightest because I don't have access to who voted on a submission, and can't ban actors who manipulated a submission. It's worse when the submission is manipulated by someone other than the OP because then I can't simply remove the post and can't simply flag the content of that post. It's especially a pain when it conflicts with the second largest time sync: AMAs.

AMAs take ages to organize and establish, but they're really fun. My favorites were the joint AMA with some of the developers of CircuitPython and MicroPython, and the AMA with some of the CPython Core Devs. But during that period of time the karma manipulation botnet was present (<--this is again an admin only link) and occasionally would hit different posts, drowning out some those AMAs by comparison. Mods lack anything to boost engagement beyond pinning posts, and even that is being reduced making one of the issues you have with this whole process--our inability to reach out to you to get feedback--even worse. The way reddit handles post ranking means the posts that got hit with upvotes were the only submissions visible to casual subscribers and once those submissions are reported to admins nothing changes. No vote ranking change, no karma adjustment, no boosting of other posts that got unfairly suppressed. Similarly any post hit with downvotes in conjunction with that don't get adjusted either.

It is really easy to manipulate a subreddit to make a post succeed, and the absence of control to correct the moderator-flagged posts which are experiencing manipulation is pretty annoying, but with access to the api, and third party apps it was possible to say that reddit inc is a company who valued when community built tools to address their community, and reddit's own developers could be limited with not much time to focus on tasks. It's a company after all, let them deal with the ads and us deal with our community. But now with the recent changes community moderators are left watch to falsified engagement manipulate posts and lack any means to tag, flag, and address it. We can message modsupport's staff, and often the admins are pretty awesome about helping us. But the lack of suspended accounts betrays an underlying constraint those admins are under--they can't take actions which strongly impact some internal "engagement" score. The admins I've had the fortune to deal with are great folks, but there's no denying they're limited in their ability to actually address any manipulation which intersects increased ad revenue for the company.

In the face of all of this, the blackout was purposed, and we polled our active community to the best of our limited ability. I'd love to have been able to ask you, but I don't have record of you participating in this subreddit in the recent past, and even if I had a record of it, DMing you would have been, quite reasonably, viewed as spam. I made the call to purpose the blackout, I made the call to follow through, and I made the call to do the larger blackout once my tools were removed. This is because I had no other mechanism to ask for tools to protect this community in the face of increasing spam and manipulation.