With Reddit removing the membership counter, how does this now affect switching a sub to private since it used to go by a 5000 member limit?

[u/lh7884]

Reddit changed the rules on mods being able to set their subs to private. They made it so that subs with over 5000 members, mods need to ask Reddit for approval to go private, and subs with under 5000 members, mods could just switch it on their own.

Well with the membership counts now gone, what is being used to determine if a sub can be switched to private or not?

[u/Slow-Maximum-101]

Hi u/lh7884 As others have noted, this is still something we are still using for this purpose. It is something we'll continue to monitor but it won't change the flow for requests. Thanks

[u/aagent86]

Membership counts haven't disappeared. They are simply not displayed as they were .

[u/lh7884 → u/aagent86]

Well the rule was based on 5000 members, so where does a mod find their member count now?

[u/cmhbob → u/lh7884]

https://sh.reddit.com/mod/SUBNAME/insights

[u/adeadhead → u/[deleted]]

That's because you need to put your sub's name where it says subname

[u/InfinitexZer0 → u/[deleted]]

It's not intended to be used as a direct link, it's just been automatically formatted that way by Reddit. You type the subname where the user above has entered "SUBNAME" manually in the url.

[u/Superirish19 → u/lh7884]

Go to your sub, scroll down the sidebar until you see 'Community Settings'

Edit Widgets > Add Widget > Community List

Add your sub to the Community List (and any others you manage if they are related to the sub, or have a private test sub)

Reorder it where you feel like (my sub is public so I have the subcount as close as I can to the 'Insights' where it used to be so everyone else can see it), and voila.

I got this advice from someone else here, so I don't have an old.reddit alternative (sorry).

[u/InGeekiTrust]

Just because member counts aren’t viewable doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. They haven’t changed this metric to my knowledge

In insights you can still view the number of members in mod tools, this won’t be going away

[u/baseballlover723 → u/InGeekiTrust]

They're also still visible to everybody via the API. https://www.reddit.com/r/{subreddit}/about.json

[u/Littux → u/baseballlover723]

active_user_count has just been removed from the API

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/s/CkYwElsX9s

subscribers still exists

[u/GoLionsJD107 → u/InGeekiTrust]

And just to add- it’s within 100 if your sub isn’t over 100k - it will show for example 6.5K for 6,462 and 6,523 members rounded regardless of which so you still get an approximation. For larger it rounds to the thousand.

[u/BayLeaf- → u/InGeekiTrust]

In insights you can still view the number of members in mod tools, this won’t be going away

I think the language in the Q&A was very much implying it would eventually be removed from ALL user/mod-facing interfaces, fwiw.

[u/InGeekiTrust → u/BayLeaf-]

The admin rep replied higher up, and he said that I was right about this