After weeks of burning through users’ goodwill, Reddit is facing a moderator strike and an exodus of its most important users. It’s the latest example of a social media site making a critical mistake: users aren’t there for the services, they’re there for the community. Building barriers to access is a war of attrition.
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Reddit is transparent about the fact that the company is not profitable. But heading into their IPO later this year, with a potential recession looming, they are desperate to show that the platform can make money. This appears to have kicked off the second stage of “enshittification”, in which users are squeezed to appeal to business customers.
The monetization creep has been evident for a while. Reddit has added a subscription ”Reddit premium”; offered “community rewards” as a paid super-vote ; embraced an NFT marketplace; changed the site's design for one with more recommended content; and started nudging users toward the official mobile app. The site has also been adding more restrictions to uploading and viewing “not safe for work” (NSFW) content. All this, while community requests for improvements to moderation tools and accessibility features have gone unaddressed on mobile, driving many users to third-party applications.
Perhaps the worst development was announced on April 18th, when Reddit announced changes to its Data API would be starting on July 1st, including new “premium access” pricing for users of the API. While this wouldn’t affect projects on the free tier, such as moderator bots or tools used by researchers, the new pricing seems to be an existential threat to third-party applications for the site. It also bears a striking resemblance to a similar bad decision Twitter made this year under Elon Musk.
At the center of this controversy has been Apollo, an alternate Reddit client app on iOS with 1.5 million monthly users. Facing potential API fees allegedly amounting to $20M per year, the app may be forced to shut down entirely. While several clients will shut down, others will need to adopt a monthly subscription model and suspend their free tier to stay viable. Non-commercial and accessibility-focused clients, such as the open source RedReader app, however, were recently offered an exemption for the time being.
Complicating the issue further is a new restriction on API access to NSFW content, putting any third-party app at a disadvantage against the official app or even the web version of the site. Even if a developer can afford API access, they may be left with inferior access to the site, and such restrictions create a disincentive for using the NSFW tag, undermining its utility.
The writing on the wall seems to be that Reddit’s actions would corral users to their official app by limiting third-party competition on mobile, alongside testing of new limitations on the mobile version of their site.
Moderators Strike
Outraged by these changes and the hostile treatment of third-party developers, thousands of moderators on the site have blacked out over 8,000 subreddits in solidarity with developers. (You may have noticed this if you tried to view almost anything on Reddit in the past 24 hours, and couldn't.) Many have vowed to remain locked to new submissions until accessibility features for blind users are implemented and the API is revised to accommodate third-party apps. Some have even doubled down and set their communities to private, making all content inaccessible to non-members. Moderators are putting a lot on the line here, risking the communities they spent countless hours maintaining on the platform.
Since it started, the blackout has kicked off a flurry of news coverage and temporarily crashed the website. The response from Reddit has only stoked the flames of this controversy.
After a disastrous AMA (i.e. “ask me anything” forum) that breathed new life into the blackout protest, Reddit’s CEO continues to defend the company’s decision. Publicly, Reddit has claimed that these changes are necessary due to operation costs and privacy concerns. “Privacy-washing” has been used as an excuse to limit automated access to a site before, but is undercut here most directly by the availability of a free API tier, which can access the same information as the paid tier for lower-volume uses.
It’s this labor and worker solidarity which gives users unique leverage over the platform
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Reddit’s future is still uncertain, as the company doubles down on their changes and communities commit to a stricter and more indefinite blackout. These new API schemes are bad for platforms, and bad for the communities who use them. What we see time and time again, though, is that when a platform turns its back on the community, it doesn’t end well. They’ll revolt and they’ll flee, and the platform will be left trying to squeeze dwindling profits from a colossal wreck.