Last week Reddit said that it was updating its policy and banning discussions of classic books from the subreddit discussion of books. The site has now come clean and admitted that this was just an April Fool’s Day joke.
“Well, you probably guessed it. We’re not actually going to ban any books from discussion in /r/Books,” explains the site. “It was our hope that our early prank would foster discussion about popular books, other literary subreddits, and how bad it is to ban books. Happily, it was a success!”
The joke wasn’t all in vain though. The moderators did admit that they want to idea to get across that readers should expand their discussions beyond very popular books. “It has always been the largest complaint about /r/Books that we bring up the same books over and over,” reads the site. “But, to defend that, of course the most popular books are going to be brought up the most. It’s a difficult issue to address in a large subreddit, and we are happy that it was discussed so much this weekend.”