Explaining The Reddit Moderator Protest
Can you imagine working for a company for free, then going on strike, and here’s the catch, still not asking to get paid?
That’s the bizarre situation happening around Reddit right now. In April, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman announced that it would start charging 3rd party app developers for access to their API or application programming interface.
Reddit is not currently profitable, and the largest target of this change is large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 that have been using Reddit to train their AI without paying for the data.
Now no one feels sorry for the AI companies, however many Reddit moderators are angry over the other developers impacted by this change, including many apps that they use for moderation. For example, Apollo for Reddit, a popular third party app to browse Reddit on Apple devices, announced that they’re closing down because they can’t afford the $20 million dollar a year bill.
In solidarity with these developers, many Reddit moderators declared a blackout between June 12th and June 14th, 2023 where they either turned their subreddits private or otherwise changed their rules in protest.
For example, most memorably, the members of r/aww, r/pics and r/gifs voted to only allow posts in their subreddit of John Oliver looking sexy.
Here’s what the numbers say about the impact of the moderator protest:
The protest is still ongoing
The website Reddark is tracking the subreddits that went dark during the initial protest. As of June 20, 3,244 of 8,829 participating subreddits are currently dark. While this protest was initially only supposed to last 48 hours, many moderators remain unsatisfied with Reddit’s response to their grievance.
The impact of the protest was never shutting the site down
According to Reddark, there are 69 subreddits that participated in the protest, and have at least 5 million members. Between June 12 - 14; 229,582 posts were published in those subreddits, a decrease of -47% from the previous 3 days.
For a variety of reasons, including Reddit threatening to replace moderators if they don’t reopen their subreddits, many subreddits that agreed to go dark never stopped posting completely or reopened under pressure.
Fans of John Oliver thirst pics might be the only real winners
Between June 16 - 19, 2023 there were 14,587 posts mentioning John Oliver on Reddit, 91X more posts than mentioned him the previous 4 days. Granted that includes content with the message Your post has been removed because it does not feature John Oliver looking sexy. Generally though, if you appreciate John Oliver looking like an absolute smokeshow, this is definitely your moment.
Conclusion: what Reddit has gotten wrong about this protest
I’ve worked for companies where paying social media platforms for their public audience data was just the cost of doing business. Charging companies for API access is a reasonable, normal expectation.
However, I’ve also worked at a social media network (RIP eSnips) where managing relationships with moderators was one of my core responsibilities.
From the perspective of managing the concerns of their moderators, Reddit is basically giving a master class in what not to do. In an interview with NBC News, CEO Steve Huffman complained about Reddit moderators having too much power, compared them to landed gentry, and floated an idea where subreddit members can vote to kick moderators out of a leadership role.
Claiming an unpaid labor force is too entitled is fundamentally misunderstanding what a huge favor moderators perform. When I worked with moderators, we ordered them custom t-shirts and fast-tracked their concerns to the development team.
You treat them like VIPs because, and this is especially true for Reddit ahead of a planned IPO, they’re creating massive value for your company and getting nothing tangible in return.
Reddit needs to find a compromise on the API cost issue that appeases their moderators. Social media networks are all about community, and if you lose your most passionate advocates, that community isn’t going to be around for very long.