The Reddit Protest Is a Battle for the Soul of the Human Internet

Thousands of subreddits representing hundreds of millions of users have gone dark in what is likely the largest moderator-coordinated protest in the history of social media. The protest brings Reddit’s business model and operating strategy into focus by highlighting the power of its moderators and the site’s reliance on unpaid labor. 

How the situation is resolved will determine the direction of one of the last good social media sites and will impact how people interact with it. A complex argument over the specifics of API pricing is, actually, a battle for the soul of the human internet, and an important labor dispute that will partially determine whether people or corporations control the internet.

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The issue is a complicated one, but what’s happening right now is essentially a game of chicken between Reddit administrators, who are site employees, and volunteer Reddit moderators—in effect a power struggle between the corporation and the users who have created thousands of thriving communities on its platform. In a bid for profitability and control, Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman is playing a dangerous game which threatens to break huge portions of the site, as well as the apps that millions of people use to access it (nontrivially, Reddit is also imperiling its status as a destination for porn). Meanwhile, Reddit’s moderators are testing their own power to impact the business decisions and operations of a huge company.

“This one feels decisively larger, better coordinated, and more impactful,” than past protests, said Stevie Chancellor, a former Reddit moderator and current assistant professor in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota who studies Reddit and social media moderation, in an interview with Motherboard. “This is really big compared to any of the other blackouts we’ve seen. It’s making a statement to Reddit that the changes to the API are not well received.”

Basically, my argument is that Reddit, for all of its flaws, is a very good website, one of the last major websites whose day-to-day activities are largely governed by its users rather than being controlled exclusively by an engagement algorithm, top-down moderation rules, and megalomaniacal billionaires. All of the issues leading to the current protests are quite complicated but they are worth understanding, and they’re worth fighting for because this may be one of our last chances to preserve an actually popular, useful website that is largely governed by its community.

Last month, Reddit announced that, like Twitter, it would begin charging for access to its application programming interface (API). The Reddit API allows developers to build programs that interact with Reddit, often in an automated way. The API is used for all sorts of things, and it costs Reddit money to serve its data via the API because its servers are getting hit each time an app requests data from it. 

Famously, the API has allowed developers to create independent apps that allow people to read, post on, interact with, and moderate Reddit. This means that, in addition to the official Reddit app, there is a healthy ecosystem of third party apps that can also be used to access Reddit. 

Some of these third-party apps—most notably Apollo, which has more than a million monthly users—are widely used by moderators because of additional moderation tools that its developer has built into the app. Reddit’s official app, for what it’s worth, is less fully featured than many of the third-party apps and there are many people who prefer not to use it. Reddit announced that it would begin charging fees to commercial applications that use its API starting July 1, which includes apps like Apollo. Apollo and other popular third party apps have since announced that they will have to go out of business because they cannot afford the astronomical fees Reddit is charging. 

Other types of tools use Reddit’s API too, though. There are all sorts of moderator bots and Reddit bots that utilize its API, for example. Researchers also use Reddit’s API to scrape data that they can use for their research. Many third party apps that use the API also have superior accessibility tools to Reddit's official apps, which allows blind users to more easily navigate the site.

The API-pocalypse was seemingly not initially caused by Reddit specifically wanting to do away with third party Reddit apps, though that may be a convenient side-effect. For this, we can basically blame companies developing AI. The dawn of large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4, Facebook’s LLaMA, and all sorts of massive AI models need to be trained on human text. Reddit is essentially a gigantic website full of highly organized, natural human interactions and makes for good training data. A company called PushShift.io had been scraping Reddit and selling that data to AI companies. When Reddit initially said it would begin policing API access, it cited PushShift: “Pushshift is in violation of our Data API Terms and has been unresponsive despite multiple outreach attempts on multiple platforms, and has not addressed their violations,” Reddit admins wrote in a post last month. “Because of this, we are turning off Pushshift’s access to Reddit’s Data API, starting today.”

In effect, Reddit has been incurring a cost in the form of server fees to allow third-party companies to scrape the data of its users and to sell that data to giant corporations working on AI tools, which will then make even more money using the data they have scraped. OpenAI, for example, parlayed its AI models partially trained using Reddit data into a multi-billion-dollar deal with Microsoft. Google's Bard is also partially trained on Reddit. In a vacuum, it is easy to see why Reddit would want to stop this sort of behavior, or to at least get paid for the data that’s being scraped.

The issue is that, in the eyes of people who use the site, Reddit has not taken much of a nuanced view of this and has instead decided to charge flat fees for API access (with some small exceptions for noncommercial use, which has thus far been poorly defined). In essence, Reddit has used its AI problem as an excuse to take down beloved third-party apps and to also change the type of data that can be grabbed from its API; Reddit has also announced that third party apps, to the extent they will still be able to make ends meet, will no longer be able to offer NSFW content via the app. This means that lots of people use Reddit for porn and will now have a harder time doing so. 

I include all of this pretext to explain that Reddit actually does have a problem to solve, but has chosen to use a blunt-force instrument that harms its users and, most importantly, its unpaid moderators to do so. Rather than simply targeting companies who are scraping Reddit for the purposes of training AI, Reddit is targeting anyone who uses the API for any commercial purpose, including people who make third-party apps that help its users and moderators access and use the site. 

“A lot of AI firms are scraping content and massively accessing the API to train their large language models,” Hanlin Li, a postdoc scholar at the University of California-Berkeley who studies Reddit moderation, told Motherboard. “The enemy is not necessarily Reddit, but the companies who are scraping this content to train their AI models, and it’s creating this secondary impact on the moderators Reddit relies on.”

In doing this, Reddit has taken a big but narrowly solvable problem and has created a much larger power struggle between itself and its moderators that is currently affecting the usability of the site and threatens its future. Moderators representing thousands of subreddits and tens of millions of users have decided to take their subreddits dark at least through Wednesday, with some subreddits saying they will go dark forever, or until Reddit relents.

Reddit is the only major social media company that relies almost entirely on unpaid, volunteer moderators to enforce the rules of its site. On the one hand, it’s an example of a multibillion-dollar corporation getting free labor. On the other hand, Reddit is such a good, human-feeling website because it relies on an moderation model more reminiscent of old internet forums where moderators are entrenched in their communities and, rather than simply enforcing a set of uniform rules handed down from a giant corporation, are helping to grow and shape the communities that they're a part of.  

Even if many moderators like what they do and enjoy some of the power that comes with moderating and guiding a community, they bring unmistakeable monetary value to Reddit the corporation. Li was the lead author of a paper published last year that found Reddit moderators work at least a collective 466 hours per day, which would cost Reddit a minimum of $3.4 million a year at a wage of $20/hour. 

This $3.4 million number isn’t an estimate of the actual value those moderators bring to Reddit, however. Li wrote that these moderators essentially make Reddit a “viable” website and business. Notably, the company was valued at more than $10 billion in 2021. 

“There’s this question of what is a fair value exchange between online volunteers and companies that might rely only on volunteer cases,” Li said. “We traditionally think of all this volunteer work as a labor of love. But at the same time, this is really valuable labor for companies, and the moderators go through so much stress and pressure, and trauma to do this work.”

The only reason Reddit is able to sell any ads at all is because their moderators and the communities they've created prevent (most) of the site from becoming a cesspool. 

What Reddit is doing with its API is somewhat hypocritical, then. Huffman says that Reddit is not profitable. He also says that third party companies should not be able to make money from Reddit while Reddit itself subsidizes them in the form of API access. This may be the case with AI companies that make billions and do not add any value to Reddit. But with third-party apps and mod tools, this argument breaks down. 

Some third-party apps make money, but they also bring Reddit more users and increase the company’s cultural relevancy and strengthen its communities. There is no guarantee that people who previously used third-party apps will suddenly start using the clunky official app once those apps go away. More importantly, apps like Apollo make moderating Reddit easier because of the moderation tools that have been built on top of it. In this sense, Apollo is providing a service to Reddit by making life easier for its moderators who, again, are unpaid. 

Reddit wants to profit off of the unpaid labor of its moderators but is unwilling to incur the costs associated with its API to do so. This is the same sin that Reddit itself is accusing third-party app developers and AI companies of committing. Reddit is getting something (thousands of hours of unpaid labor, healthy, thriving communities against which it can sell advertisements) for nothing but the cost of serving its API. It is apparently sick of this arrangement, and hopes that it can continue to get thousands of hours of unpaid labor and thriving communities without incurring costs to do so.

The unpaid nature of Reddit’s moderators actually gives them quite a bit of power, since they can simply stop providing their volunteer service, which is what makes these protests so interesting. Li and Chancellor say that their research suggests that if moderators were paid employees of Reddit, the dynamics within their subreddits would change. 

Many moderators consider themselves to be members of their communities, and the vast majority of moderators do not moderate massive, general-interest communities like r/funny or r/videos. Most moderators curate content within the hyper-specific subreddits that align with their interest: “Part of the insane value that a lot of people derive from Reddit is based on how curated or thoughtful moderators are about the direction and kinds of communities they want to run,” Chancellor said. “I don’t want to call it altruistic because I’m not trying to diminish their work, but fundamentally they care about the topics they work on… but there’s this positive, personal motivation for why they moderate, and a lot of people are doing this because they love the community, because they care about the community.” 

It likely wouldn’t make financial sense to pay someone who spends an hour or two a week moderating a niche subreddit; it would also fundamentally change that moderator’s power dynamic with Reddit and with their community. They could, for instance, be forced to adhere to specific working hours, follow specific rules, or could be required to moderate specific subreddits they have no interest in or connection to as part of their jobs. This responsibility that moderators feel they have toward their communities and the fact that they have no financial incentive to do whatever Reddit tells them to do is the specific reason why moderators have the ability to coordinate large protests like the one we are seeing now. It’s also why Reddit hasn’t been able to enact dictatorial power over the nuances of how its platform operates.

Li and Chancellor argue that Reddit needs to value its moderators more than it currently does if it hopes to have a bright future: "As social platforms like Reddit favor revenue generation and user engagement, moderators are under-supported to manage the expansion of online communities," they wrote in a paper published last year. "To preserve these online communities, developers and researchers of social platforms must account for and support as much of this labor as possible."

The big question is, basically, what happens now? Who wins? Who backs down? And what will Reddit look like when the dust settles? 

Reddit, for its part, seems to be hoping that this blows over. Huffman has shown no inclination to change his stance. Even during these protests, Reddit, as a platform, is still sort of functional because many subreddits have decided not to go dark. (Googling for Reddit results is now a disaster, however; most threads that surface as part of a Google search are inaccessible because of the blackout).

If Reddit doesn’t soften its stance on charging for the API and protesting subreddits don’t come back online, there is, unfortunately for protesting users, still a path forward that looks more or less like business as usual. Reddit could decide to replace moderators of big communities with people who are willing to bring them back online. This would likely cause even more of a shitshow, but Reddit could hope for that controversy to eventually die down. More likely and less destructively, Reddit could just do nothing and wait for replacements of high-profile communities to naturally form. 

Browsing r/all Monday night showed a bunch of different subreddits that normally don’t have a high profile surfacing among the top sections on the site. There are also ready-made replacements for some of the large communities that have shut down in protest, and at least some people have shown they are willing to cross the digital picket line. While r/nba was dark for the last game of the NBA finals Monday night, r/nbacirclejerk had a game thread and dozens of posts about the Nuggets-Heat game. The popular r/antiwork subreddit is currently dark, but there’s lots of similar posts right now in r/freefromwork.

Reddit has seen this sort of shift on smaller scales numerous times over the years. After quite a bit of drama, Reddit deprioritized r/technology as a “default” subreddit a few years ago. A host of new ones cropped up to replace it (and r/technology eventually returned, more or less, as normal). New subreddits are ascendent every year, while others fall out of favor or become echo chambers. 

So, there is a version of this story where, in a quest for profitability, Reddit essentially exerts dictatorial power, ignores its moderators, makes it more difficult to view porn on its site, screws over blind people, and centralizes power and attention around its official app at the expense of the much better apps many people use to access the site. 

That would be a sad outcome, in which Reddit is too big to fail and in which Huffman decides that he doesn’t care about the people who make its website one of the last human-feeling places on the internet. It is also possibly a viable path forward, given that Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Google search, YouTube, and countless other websites have all chosen to make the user experience worse through any number of disastrous decisions but have all been able to persist in some form. This is the enshittification of Reddit, and it feels closer now than ever.

This also appears to be the sad path that Huffman is intent on taking. In a memo to Reddit employees that was leaked to The Verge, Huffman has suggested that the rage and the protests "will pass."

"We do anticipate many [blacked out subreddits] will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much," Huffman wrote. "We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor. There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well."

The question now is will Reddit go back to "normal," and what does that normal look like? Some subreddits have indeed come back already, while others have said they're going to continue to be blacked out indefinitely.  

The better outcome here, and the one that is still possible, is one where Huffman and Reddit do not take its unpaid labor force and its users for granted, come to the table, and hammer out a compromise. 

"I'm cautiously optimistic because Reddit blackouts have actually caused change on the platform in the past," Chancellor said. "My hope is that Reddit considers alternate pricing models for people who build mod tools and apps… but, I guess Reddit could just say 'screw you.' That would be really disappointing."