After relying on the free labor of thousands of moderators for years, Reddit suddenly decided to make life harder for them.
Unsurprisingly, the latter did not appreciate the unilateral and uncoordinated decision of the “internet homepage” to charge for access to its API for third-party applications. In response, moderators of at least 2,500 of the most popular subreddits have agreed to block access to them, starting today. The responses and justifications from the platform’s management did not live up to expectations, far from it.
Why such a change ?
In April, Reddit management announced a major change that could significantly change the experience of many users: making access to its API chargeable. The API is a software interface that allows sites and applications outside Reddit to have access to some of its features and data in order, most often, to offer an additional service to users. Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, justified this decision by the need for the platform to finally become profitable, in a crisis communication that could be described as catastrophic.
Because if this argument is understandable, the price levels announced would not really make it possible to achieve this: the most popular third-party Reddit applications, such as Apollo, have already announced that they could not provide their service with regard to advertised prices. In fact, paying for access to the API would therefore remove most of these services… and therefore would not make a profit for Reddit. The timing is also interesting: the announcement is made shortly after Elon Musk’s decision to do the same for Twitter, with similar results. And if the latter surely has skills, that of making a profitable social network does not seem to be part of it.
But there is at least one difference between the two platforms: if the moderators of Twitter are paid little, those of Reddit are not at all. The latter are passionate volunteers who follow strict rules established largely by themselves and above all… endowed with a power of control over the content of the platform that does not exist on any other social network.
Can the moderators’ strike change things?
If it seems unbelievable that Reddit continues to lose money year after year while its moderators/content managers are volunteers, the idea that management could make such a decision without consulting them is equally unbelievable. Because these famous third-party applications, if they allow you to personalize your Reddit experience, above all offer features that do not exist on the basic version of Reddit. And among these, two in particular focus attention: the audio playback of content for the visually impaired, and the increased possibilities of moderation, in particular on smartphones, which can be offered.
So the moderators of many subreddits, with some support from other users, have taken the decision to go on strike starting today. But that doesn’t mean the site will become a dumping ground for hate during this time: all relevant subreddits go private, and no one can post there. This is not a marginal movement: we are talking here about at least 2,500 different communities, including several hundred of the most frequented. This concerns historical reddit subs such as: r/videos, r/nostupidquestions, r/Tifu, r/funny, or even r/NextFuckingLevel. A global press release was taken up by many of them to explain this choice, and most posted their own. And if this blackout was initially planned to last 48 hours, the catastrophic answers of Steve Huffman during his AMA on the question, his personal attacks against a developer of the platform, or the general management of the movement of discontent changed the objective . And from 48 hours, this blackout goes to an indefinite period for many of the communities concerned, that is to say until they win their case.
If it remains to be seen if this change will earn any dollar for Reddit, the loss of content and users has already been recorded. And finding new volunteer moderators in the future could be much more difficult.
Source : The Verge, Mashable
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