On Monday, thousands of the largest communities on Reddit went private, effectively removing themselves from the site. In an instant, Reddit became less interesting and useful. Remarkably, so did Google: As one of the internet’s biggest searchable repositories of content made by humans, including millions of user-generated questions and helpful answers, Reddit, which was started in 2005 as a link aggregator with the goal of being the “front page of the internet,” has become part of the search engine’s core infrastructure.
The blackout was organized in protest of Reddit’s plan to charge developers for access to its data, which could have the effect of killing a range of tools and apps used by Reddit’s volunteer moderators and some of its most devoted users and contributors. Reddit’s position is that third-party apps, including popular Reddit browsers like Apollo that aim to improve the experience of using the site, cost the company money while undermining its business model and functioning as “competitors” — echoing Elon Musk’s justifications for a similar move at Twitter earlier this year. In the process of becoming a pillar of online life, Reddit never turned a profit. Now, its leadership needs that to change, and they’re running out of patience.
In a leaked memo addressing the uproar, CEO Steve Huffman assured staffers that “like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well,” and that it hadn’t had a “significant revenue impact.” As the blackout has stretched on — some communities reopened after two days as they had initially planned, but many have remained closed — his tone has hardened. In an interview with the Verge, Huffman began by describing Reddit as “a platform built by its users” and compared it to a city: “We’re a platform and tech company on one hand, but on the other it’s a living organism, this democratic living organism, created by its users.” Pressed on the protest over the new API policy, though, he quickly turned: “That’s our business decision. And we’re not undoing that business decision.” By the end of the conversation, he had left the “city” behind entirely:
90-plus percent of Reddit users are on our platform, contributing, and are monetized either through ads or Reddit Premium. Why would we subsidize this small group? Why would we effectively pay them to use Reddit but not everybody else who also contributes to Reddit? Does that make sense? These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free. And that free comes at the expense of our other users and our business. That’s what this is about. It can’t be free.
In an interview with NBC News, Huffman accused volunteer moderators of subverting the true will of Reddit’s users, who he suggested increasingly sympathize with his position. He called the protesting moderators the “landed gentry” of the platform, the “people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
Mr. Huffman is stretching in a variety of directions here. Reddit is not a feudal government, or a city in any sense; neither is it ultimately “democratic,” as he frequently suggests. It’s an advertising- and subscription-supported web service that also depends on free content and unpaid labor from its users. It is, substantially, in the same business as Meta, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok — giving people something to use mostly for free in exchange for their monetizable time and attention.
But Huffman’s mixed metaphors do tell a story. As similar as its underlying business model may be, Reddit feels different from its social-media competitors and contributes something different to the internet around it. Rather than prioritizing individual profiles, it emphasizes communities and their posts; rather than presenting its users with simple chronological feeds or overwhelming them with algorithmic recommendations, it relies heavily on user feedback to rank content in the form of upvotes and downvotes. To a greater extent than most large platforms, Reddit allows and expects its groups to moderate themselves. Unlike its feed-based peers, it is clearly descended from a smaller, more fragmented era of the web, in which people with shared interests and enthusiasms found each other on forums and contributed out of a sense of, well, community.
As Alex Pareene writes at Defector, Reddit’s function as a sort of forum-of-forums has contributed to a funny reputational trajectory, “from merely embarrassing but occasionally amusing, to actively harmful, to — mainly by accident — essential.” I’ll add to this a brief structural account. Reddit started as an aggregator with voting and comments, which made it a good place for a limited number of people to find and chat about links. As an aggregator, though, it was seen by some of its smaller established peers — and forum users elsewhere who felt they had a claim over internet culture, for example 4chan — as slow and sort of parasitic. As Reddit grew, its communities started to function in self-sustaining ways, becoming, in many cases, the de facto or simply last remaining spaces for forum-like communication. As a much larger and more effectively monetized internet grew around it, though, Reddit’s position was flipped: Rather than aggregating content from the rest of the web, it became a place from which original material was aggregated — by commercial publishers, sure, but also by Facebook users looking for something funny to share with their friends. Or by Google, in its attempts to serve honest and relevant how-to guides or product recommendations from an increasingly polluted web.
From the distant historical perspective of a ’90s or 2000s forum moderator or avid user, the Reddit of today might sound like a pretty depressing destination: a link aggregator that replaced and flattened the web’s independent communities into a single template owned by one company. But place it next to the other places people started spending most of their time online in the 2010s and it looks like a civic institution in comparison. It may not be ideal, but Reddit is a place where people build spaces with shared norms to talk about stuff they want to talk about. It’s not the feed.
The experience of feed-based social networks is primarily about the individual. In addition to endless streams of content, they provide their users with personal feedback and validation, or opportunities for notoriety or fame, in exchange for their contribution and engagement. Their most devoted users, whose presence helps keep others around, are driven to cultivate brands — to see their followers as customers — in all but explicit marketplaces for attention.
Reddit’s most devoted users, however, are up to something a bit different. Sure, they’re producing content for upvotes, maybe, but usually under pseudonyms, and to no commercial benefit. It’s possible some of its moderators are on power trips as they contribute workweeks of time to keeping their communities usable. It’s plausible that some of its third-party developers see Reddit’s API as a loophole they can profit off of, rather than a tool they can use to meet a clear demand from other Reddit enthusiasts who want a little more control over how they use the platform. Mostly, they just stubbornly continue to arrange themselves in communal ways, to communal ends, in a manner that — if not quite selfless or civic-minded — serves members’ own interests.
A majority of Reddit users don’t post much, if at all. Reddit is a site they browse or a resource they encounter in Google searches. Its volunteer moderators are a rare and idiosyncratic breed. But Reddit has always struggled to make money because its leadership seemed to understand that aggressive attempts to monetize would make its most active and valuable (and obsessive and defensive) users, the ones inclined to provide and filter and organize its content, less likely to feel like they’re there for each other, more cognizant of the firm that’s overseeing the whole operation, and more likely to see their contributions as unpaid labor for a corporation. Reddit’s leaders were afraid of alienating these devotees, rightly I think, and now they’re either not or have bigger things to worry about.
This has contributed to a sense of confusion in Reddit’s rhetoric about what sort of conflict it’s in with its moderators and users. Is this a labor dispute? Sort of! Except nobody’s getting paid. Is this a democratic process? Sure, except everyone knows it can be overridden. Are app developers doing a service developing software for Reddit’s most devoted users? Yes. Or are they scammers? Also, apparently, yes. Are moderators insignificant weirdos who are power mad and holding the site hostage? Some are — so how about a coup or two to depose them.
In that conversation with the Verge, Huffman inadvertently offered more clarity:
We allow the protests. We don’t have problems with protests. I think it’s important. That’s part of the democracy. It’s part of the democratic part of Reddit. But the users are not in support of it now. It’s like a protest in a city that goes on too long, and the rest of the citizens of the city would like to go about their lives.
Protest, democracy, citizens? Sure, whatever. This is a boss talking, unable to pretend that he’s anything else. This is a tech CEO who has praised Musk’s transformation of Twitter as “reaffirming.” Reddit, like any commercial platform, is only a community until its owners need it to be something else. Huffman is obviously right that Reddit will survive this protest, which was triggered by niche concerns among a subset of users. But, in time, it will have to confront the question that has haunted it since the very beginning: Did Reddit become invaluable despite its inability to make money? Or because of it?
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