Reddit, the content aggregation and discussion website, is a town square for many people seeking information, memes, and camaraderie among like-minded individuals.

Much like Twitter, it became a town square because people found the site relatively friendly and simple to use, open to third-party applications that made using it easier, and generally well-moderated – in this case by volunteers rather than a paid moderation team.

Millions of people flocked to Reddit because its owners created a space that people wanted to use.

Reddit appears to be following in the footsteps of Twitter, however, in that its current CEO Steve Huffman has opted to bend Reddit to his will, much like Elon Musk did with his acquisition of Twitter.

In doing so, Reddit stands to become a shell of its former self.

What’s going on?

Reddit’s making changes to its application programming interface – the system that allows third-party app developers to “talk to Reddit” and pull data to show on their apps – which include charging developers to access the API and make API calls.

While Reddit has said it would make the changes realistic, Apollo app developer Christian Selig has gone on the record to note how their pricing would make development of third-party applications for the site unsustainable, and added the pricing announcement was done abruptly. Earlier in the year, Reddit said they had not planned any pricing tweaks “in the short to medium term. And we’re talking like order of years.”

As Selig said in a post on June 20, “Charging developers 29x higher than your average revenue per user is not ‘based in reality.'”

Selig has gone on to debunk a number of claims Reddit has made. Among these are claims app developers do not want to pay for API access, that app developers are unwilling to collaborate with Reddit, and that Reddit is not trying to be like Twitter in the Musk era.

For the last bit – that Reddit isn’t trying to be like Twitter – NBC News reported on June 17 that Huffman “praised Musk’s aggressive cost-cutting and layoffs at Twitter.”

Said Huffman in the NBC report, “Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale.”

Huffman added, “Now, they’ve taken the dramatic road… and I guess I can’t sit here and say that we’re not either, but I think there’s a lot of opportunity here.”

Unsupported labor and the fascinating rebellion

Unlike Twitter, which gutted a lot of its workforce including in moderation and trust and safety, Reddit has long been a place where its value is created by the unpaid labor of moderators and well-meaning folks sharing their knowledge and resources with others.

They didn’t ask for compensation, but they did hope to be treated respectfully as users and as volunteer workers who made Reddit what it is.

Huffman, in an interview with The Verge on June 15, said, “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.”

Huffman is focused on third-party app developers in this case, but extrapolating further, what happens when the people who make Reddit what it is revolt?

That’s what happened when thousands of subreddits went dark – with a number of them remaining indefinitely closed now – to protest the API changes.

Now, Reddit has decided to strong-arm the protesting subreddits: Either go back online or be booted from your subreddits as a moderator and be replaced, with your subreddits being forcibly reopened for use.

In a bid to further rebel, some subreddits have decided to protest by opening up, with caveats informed by democratic votes.

For example, some subreddits, like r/pics and r/aww, have become bastions of pictures and media of British comedian John Oliver. The subreddit for the online game Guild Wars 2 is continuing protesting by allowing people to vote whether to make the subreddit not-safe-for-work tagged (preventing advertising revenue) or themed as an appreciation subreddit for an in-game character (exasperating people who aren’t in-the-know).

The r/pics subreddit is even going further, by instituting a second vote: whether to allow only pictures of John Oliver looking sexy, to allow any media of John Oliver (even AI-generated imagery, for example), or to take down its subreddit-specific rules and allow anyone to make Posts Illustrating Community Sentiment… or r/PICS.

Needless to say, as a Reddit user myself of 11 years, I support the protest actions of the moderators and users. The users themselves create the value of Reddit as a town square, and if third-party app developers make it easier for users to go on Reddit for whatever reason, I think they should be supported as well.

Now, I understand Reddit is trying to do this in a bid to stave of artificial intelligence scrapers who would try to use Reddit’s massive repository of information to train their AI, but that doesn’t mean engaging in behavior that would destroy the very fabric of the Reddit tapestry.

Reddit should get back to the drawing board on these API changes, talk to third-party developers and invest in creating a process to weed out AI-training API scrapers instead of setting up a blanket charge against everyone, stop gaslighting Redditors to try and garner support or justification, and generally… stop acting like the user contributions, unpaid moderators, and the ecosystem supporting them aren’t the lifeblood of your site.

Otherwise, you’re going to end up becoming the second hellsite that pops up on the internet, right after Musk’s version of Twitter. – Rappler.com