More from Reddit protest updates: news on the apps shutting down and Reddit’s fights with mods
In response to CEO Steve Huffman’s characterization that Reddit moderators are like the “landed gentry” and him saying that Reddit make changes to let users vote out mods, r/PoliticalHumor has embraced “pure democracy” in the subreddit and is letting all users be mods.
Reddit has paid lip service to their moderator-users for years, perpetually insisting that communication and mod tools would quickly improve after a stumble like this one. We’re cutting all of that out and bringing power directly to the people so that we can show the brilliance of Spez’s idea today, rather than waiting years for reddit to develop it.
According to a message at the top of the stream:
Reddark247 will go offline at midnight UTC. You can still watch reddark at reddark.untone.uk. Reddark247 may return.
The stream has been a handy live tracker to follow which subreddits are private or restricted as part of the ongoing protests toward the company. The main Reddark website will still be up, though.
(Midnight UTC is 8PM ET, by the way.)
Apollo for Reddit developer Christian Selig has a new post pushing back on Reddit’s claims that it’s “happy” to work with developers who “want to work with us.” Apollo is set to shut down on June 30th because of Reddit’s forthcoming — and potentially expensive — API pricing.
The developer of rif is fun for Reddit has also pushed back, sharing emails with The Verge last week about his conversations with the company.
Not all Reddit communities protesting recent API pricing changes are staying dark indefinitely — but subreddits that have reopened are finding new, amusing ways to show their support.
A handful only allow posts about John Oliver. r/horny is all about Christianity and Minecraft. And the iPhone subreddit is just Tim Cook now.
Yesterday, two of Reddit’s biggest communities that had previously gone dark in protest of Reddit’s API changes — r/pics and r/gifs — reopened as John Oliver stan communities following a user poll on whether they should do that or resume business as usual.
Today, r/aww announced it had done the same:
It was only fair to let you determine what r/aww should be about... and you overwhelmingly chose to only allow adorable content featuring John Oliver, Chiijohn, and anything else that closely resembles them.
Someone told him about the technically-compliant re-opening of two popular subreddits — that is, that users at both r/pics and r/gifs voted to re-open, but as John Oliver image repositories — and he has tweeted his approval.
“These threats against the very individuals responsible for maintaining Reddit’s communities cannot be ignored,” u/demmian wrote. The company recently sent a threatening message to the moderators of some subreddits participating in the protests, and an admin account said that Reddit can invite new mods to “keep these spaces open and accessible to users” if “a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating.”
The subreddit blackout may have ended for many, but data from SimilarWeb may show that it has had a real impact, according to Engadget today — one that could explain threatening messages mods received this week.
The outlet saw documents showing a total 6.6 percent drop in daily visits from the day before the blackout’s June 12th start to the end of June 13th (about 57 million down to 52 million) as well as falling engagement time that Engadget says is a three-year low.
In an interview with NBC News Huffman says “my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale.” More:
“As a company smaller than theirs, sub-$1 billion in revenue, I used to look at Twitter and say, ‘Well, why can’t they break even at 4 or 5 billion in revenue? What about their business do we not understand?’ Because I think we should be able to do that quite handsomely,” he said.
“And then I think one of the non-obvious things that Elon showed is what I was hoping would be true, which is: You can run a company with that many users in the ads business and break even with a lot fewer people,” Huffman said.
“They had to do some pretty violent changes and violent surgery to get there,” he adds. Well then! Buckle up, Redditors.
After chatting privately with Reddit employees this week, I was surprised to hear that there isn’t as much internal opposition as I would have thought. My takeaway is that Huffman seems to, at least for now, have the backing of his troops. The vibe I’ve gotten is that, like Huffman, most believe this backlash will blow over. Internally, there has been a tone shift recently from leadership and a push to rein in costs, slow hiring, and get the business out of the red. These API changes are part of that.
“The company is largely behind Steve,” one senior employee told me Thursday. “I think the internal narrative feels pretty clear to everyone and there isn’t much controversy,” said another. “Makes me wonder if we just didn’t handle the comms / rollout as well as we could.”
[The Verge]
Reddit needs to make money. That’s fair! It’s a company! Companies that don’t make money stop being companies! But Reddit is also more dependent on the good will of its users than most companies — and is at odds with some of those users as we speak. Can Reddit the company and Reddit the community both survive? That’s the question of the week.
(Also, we get heady about the Vision Pro again, and something about a meat thermometer. It’s The Vergecast, y’all.)
I just sent this to Reddit PR:
Reddit’s Fact Sheet says that ”We respect our communities’ ability to protest as long as mods follow our Moderator Code of Conduct” and also “We respect the communities right to protest.” Originally, we took that at face value. You can protest, as long as you don’t break the rules. We read your rules, and the rules included nothing about protests of this sort or any other.
However, you are now telling us that by definition, a protest of this form breaks the rules. Therefore, by definition, Reddit does not support this form of protest.
More:
In a conversation with NPR, Huffman spoke more about his concerns with big tech companies building AI models using Reddit data. “If they take our content and build businesses on it, that’s an issue,” Huffman said.
To NBC News, Huffman “said he plans to pursue changes to Reddit’s moderator removal policy to allow ordinary users to vote moderators out more easily if their decisions aren’t popular.” My colleague Sean Hollister wrote more about the company’s mod policies earlier on Thursday.
Here’s my full interview with Huffman.
