You Can't Look at Porn on Any Reddit Third-Party App Now

Last month, Reddit announced it would limit access to mature content through its API as part of changes to access and new, exorbitant fees for third-party app developers 

Reddit said that the changes to API access would begin on July 5, and porn was still visible on third-party apps such as Narwhal until then. Now, NSFW content is unviewable on mobile devices unless users are logged in on the official Reddit app.

As of Thursday, visiting a NSFW subreddit on the app Narwhal shows a message that directs users to get the official Reddit app and confirm they’re over 18 years of age. 

“Effective July 5, 2023, we will limit access to mature content via our Data API as part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails to how explicit content and communities on Reddit are discovered and viewed,” Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman wrote under his u/spez username in an announcement last month. “This change will not impact any moderator bots or extensions.” 

Moderators, who are unpaid volunteers helping enforce Reddit’s community guidelines, have been in revolt since April when the platform announced the new API rules. Many mods use third-party apps to keep their communities safe and useful for members; these third-party apps are often easier to use and less buggy in comparison to Reddit’s official app. 

In June, hundreds of subreddits went dark in protest of the API access changes, setting their communities to private and therefore unviewable to everyone except approved members. After the multi-day blackout, many mods kept the protest going by setting their previously safe-for-work subreddits to NSFW and allowing explicit content like porn. Advertisements aren’t allowed to run on NSFW subreddits. 

In response, Reddit administrators—paid employees of the company—removed mods from their own subreddits and left many of the protesting subs without any mods; subreddits without moderators are eventually banned if they’re left without mods for a significant amount of time. 

Reddit making NSFW inaccessible on the few remaining third party apps that have not yet shut down is a major blow for those apps' usability and utility. It's also a signal that Reddit is hell-bent on eventually forcing all users to its own official app, because NSFW content is a large part of Reddit (and it's not all porn—NSFW can also include sex education, harm reduction, and conversations about sexuality and gender).

This most recent move by Reddit is also the latest to make accessing NSFW content on Reddit from smartphones far more difficult. In 2016, Apple removed a series of Reddit apps because they allowed NSFW content in violation of the App Store's terms of service. Reddit apps were only allowed back in if they showed NSFW content only to logged-in users who had explicitly opted into seeing NSFW content from their Reddit account from a desktop browser. Reddit also does not allow NSFW content to be viewed from its mobile website; when trying to view a NSFW subreddit, users are directed to use the official app. 

“It’s a constant fight to keep this content at all,” Huffman said in June. “We are going to keep it. But the regulatory environment has gotten much stricter about adult content, and as a result we have to be strict / conservative about where it shows up.”

Reddit has long been one of the few places online where explicit content has mostly been allowed to thrive. But these decisions by Huffman and Reddit’s leadership, which reportedly want to take the company public in the near future, means it’s joining the many mainstream social media platforms that’s closing the walls around sex online.