A couple of days ago, the Reddit admins announced that they would be redesigning the site and, along with this, removing the ability for moderators to customize their subreddit's CSS. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Their plan is essentially to scrap direct CSS access in favour of a system of "themes and widgets", which will undoubtedly strip customization options down to the bare bones. Subreddit individuality is what makes reddit reddit, and the admins want to take this away. In addition, many moderators have spent countless hours perfecting the style of their subs to fit the needs and culture of their users. This will all be for naught when the admins pull the plug.

Many communities rely on full control over CSS for their very existence. /r/pixelparty is an example of an extremely creative use of styling to create a brand new artform on reddit. /r/ooer, a veritable piece of living reddit history, is another. These subreddits and many others like them would be absolutely destroyed by this change. The truth is clear - removing CSS stifles creativity and ruins communities.

To quote /u/reseph, the moderator who predicted this a fortnight ago and wrote an impassioned message to the admins in the announcement thread:

>So what, we're just homogenizing Reddit now?

>At the minimum, I see this as taking away the personality each subreddit has. We also lose the ability to control and improve UX, considering the admins have been exceptionally slow to improve any UX (even something like link flair).

>To be clear, I'm not upset by the fact that the time we spent on our CSS is being made useless. I'm upset that we'll be losing functionality and individual subreddit personality.

But there is hope. If you are a moderator, you can sticky this petition in your sub(s) and enlist your users to help the cause. If you are a reporter, you can publish an article about reddit's proposed changes and their certain effect on the community. And if you are an ordinary citizen of reddit, you can join the growing and vocal community at /r/ProCSS to show your support.

And of course, if you are a reddit admin, you can, ya know, not disable CSS. That would be nice ;)