2023-06-23 04:20:00
« I feel like I’m literally the only person in the world who can fix the situation, and I have a moral obligation to do so. Here is what Steve Huffman, co-founder of Reddit, said when he returned to the head of the company in 2015 with the mission of calming the beginning of the mutiny of the social network’s volunteer moderators. Ironically, the 30-year-old finds himself eight years later leading a showdown with these same moderators, who have been blocking the operation of the site for ten days.
Triggered by a financial measure, the protest movement threatens to instill doubt among investors, while the network with more than 430 million monthly users is considering going public soon. To resolve the situation, Steve Huffman refuses to negotiate. Sure of himself, he asserts that the movement will run out of steam. But his showdown with the moderators is akin to a dangerous balancing act, as they are essential to the functioning of the platform.
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Moderators, the lungs of Reddit
Unlike Facebook or Twitter, Reddit is divided into communities, called “subreddits”, which users must join if they wish to contribute. Each of these spaces, comparable to mini-forums, comes with its own set of rules defined and applied by volunteer moderators (or “mods”, in the jargon). Without a subordinate relationship with Reddit, the latter have a very important control over their community, and are therefore pillars of the social network. Kind of like superusers.
A study published last year by three American academics estimated the weekly workload of all moderators at 466 hours. In a scenario where these volunteers were paid $20 an hour, the company would have to spend an additional $3.4 million per year, the researchers projected. The last transparency report Reddit also said moderators were behind 58% of content removals that violated the site’s policies, more than the company’s own employees.
However, for 10 days, a noisy part of these influential users has been on strike. In question, a measure announced on May 31: Reddit will charge for the previously free use of its APIs, channels that allow third parties to retrieve data and activate site features. And this, from the month of July. ” Concretely, itThe Policy Change Will Kill Reddit’s Alternative Clients “, alert a text shared on several subreddits. Apollo, Reddit is Fun or BaconReader are apps that rely on APIs to offer ad-free browsing on Reddit, with additional features. Other tools, for example to manage spam, could also be threatened.
Users strike
The company’s decision seems logical, as the current situation seems like economic nonsense: Reddit provides, at its own expense, data essential to the operation of entrance portals to the site competing with its own. This does not prevent the strikers from revolting: according to them, the official application – which will become the only option in the short term – would be ” bad quality », « not accessible to people with disabilities », et « very difficult to use to moderate “. They therefore demand, at a minimum, a reduction in the amounts to be paid, so that the alternative versions can survive.
To get their demands across, the strikers launched between June 12 and 14 an operation blocking their communities. Moderators of 8,800 subreddits (out of over 100,000) have locked access to their community. In other words, they have closed entire sections of the social network in the eyes of users. While most have since reopened, about a quarter of subreddits continue to stand up to Reddit ten days later and plan to continue in the long term.
Steve Huffman, inflexible leader
Faced with the strikers, therefore, stands Steve Huffman, qualified by the co-founder of Twitch Justin Ken as « Redditor alpha “: known to be a “troll” on the internet, the leader likes to play tricks on his friends or engage in heated debates, and he has always spent more than an hour a day on the site he co-founded in 2006. And he does not hesitate to play on this status. ” It’s easier for me than for another, because I’m one of the founders, to say “fuck you guys this is how i always wanted it done“”, he explained in 2015.
This posture is reflected in its response to the strike. ” Disputes and protests are important. But the problem with this one is that it’s not going to change anything since it’s a business decision that we’re not going to negotiate. “, he decides, in an interview with NBC. Steve Huffman therefore decided to play for time, saying that ” the forums are not going to stay offline indefinitely “. But he is not satisfied with inaction. On the one hand, he promises that Reddit won’t disqualify strikers. On the other hand, he recalls that the regulation authorizes the company to dispossess of its advantages a “mod” which ” abandon his community » et « would prevent a large number of people from participating ».
More so, the leader has dangled possible changes, so that members of a subreddit can more easily exclude unpopular moderators. Defending that they do not represent the users, Steve Huffman compared the strikers to ” nobles of the Middle Ages. ” These are people who arrived first, and passed the torch to their descendants. It’s not democratic “, he asserts. Currently, “mods” can only be undone by higher-ranking moderators, or by Reddit employees for inactivity or rule violations, which are very rare cases.
Conflict escalation
Faced with these threats of a popular overthrow, the moderators of the r/pics, r/aww or even r/videos subreddits, all with more than 30 million subscribers, have changed their mode of action. If they conceded a reopening of their doors, each submitted a vote for the attention of their community. With two proposals: go back to normal, or… publish only content relating to John Oliver, the famous caustic presenter of Last Week Tonight. ” We – the supposed “nobility” – want to bend to the wishes of the royal court, which has enjoined us to follow the will of the members in the operation of the subreddit », write not without sarcasm r/pics moderators.
The result ? Everywhere, a landslide victory, with more than 90% of votes in favor of the John Oliver option. Thus, for more than three days already, the face of the presenter invades the subreddits in rebellion. How far will the escalation of the conflict go? Reddit has already started drawing lines that shouldn’t be crossed, and dispossessed moderators who had labeled their community as Not Safe For Work (reserved for sexual and violent content, prohibited for those under 18). The NSFW tag prevents the distribution of advertisements, and therefore directly attacks the portfolio of the social network.
The race for profitability above all
Steve Huffman says the unpopular API billing measure will save his company more than $10 million in infrastructure costs each year. Still with NBC, he recalled that the company was not generating a profit, and that its turnover remained below the billion dollar mark – it would even be barely more than 400 million euros annually, despite a steady progress since the return of the co-founder.
At a time when the social network – and tech as a whole – is trying to prove its ability to achieve profitability, the measure is therefore presented as inevitable. Steve Huffman repeats in his various speeches that his company must become ” self-sufficient “. That’s why he’s thinking about new monetization channels when Reddit is almost entirely dependent on these days. In addition to API billing, the boss plans to cash out AI companies. Many of them, including OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, exploit the exchanges of the social network. They allow them to feed their AI models with a more familiar language than press articles or works of literature, which allows them to understand any type of command (or “prompt”, in the jargon).
According to several American media, if Huffman is so insistent, it is because Reddit would consider an IPO between the end of 2023 and the beginning of next year. Its first IPO attempt, in 2021, was aborted, following the collapse of tech stocks. Will the entrepreneur be able to calm the discontent of users in time?
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