Among the many unforeseen effects of ChatGPT's release, there is a change in policy at Reddit that has caused a significant disruption among its community moderators. Reddit has served as a valuable and, to date, free source of training data for ChatGPT and other large language model (LLM) AI - billions of utterances from hundreds of millions of people about thousands of topics over a 15 year span. These LLM AIs are already worth billions of dollars, more than Reddit was ever worth during its first 15 years. It is therefore understandable that Reddit as a company wants to stop the practice of giving its back catalog of data away for free. They're not the only ones keen to point out that the training data used by LLMs, while ostensibly free to access, were created and facilitated by others who, it could be argued, were indispensable in the creation of now-popular AI programs like ChatGPT.
This isn't the only reason why Reddit would want to turn off the spigot of free access to its vast archives of posts and comments via an API. An ecosystem of third party apps has flourished under this policy, resulting in the loss of untold hours of user attention to ads on Reddit's official app, and thus lost revenue. Many users have become accustomed to accessing Reddit this way, and are understandably upset at having to migrate to the official Reddit app, widely regarded as inferior to the third party apps.
Then there's the issue of how subreddit moderators use the API to more effectively moderate their communities. They can use the API to quickly assess a user's posting or comment history to see if a disruptive comment or post is part of a larger pattern and thus worth banning the user (this includes spambots and trolls that, unmoderated, could overwhelm a subreddit with useless or disruptive content). They use them to determine when a question asked by a user has already been answered in the past, and to highlight that answer. APIs are also relied upon by some users with disabilities, as a way of access the platform. This post from the moderators of r/AskHistorians has a good summary of other ways in which mods rely on the API.
Reddit as a company seems interested in addressing the disability accessibility issue, carving out an exception for third party apps specifically designed for users with disabilities. Beyond that, they don't seem particularly interested in walking back their decision to charge for access to the API...yet.
The conflict between the administrators (paid employees of the company) and moderators (unpaid volunteers who manage Reddit's tens of thousands of active communities) is a familiar one - management vs. labor. As with any such conflict, labor's ability to get what they want assumes that they can't easily be replaced by more willing labor - be it human or automated. Can the company still produce something of value to the consumer without the willing participation of current labor?
In most cases, replacement labor produces something different than what was produced by the original labor, and in most cases, its (at least initially) regarded as inferior (labor certainly has an interest in highlighting its inferiority). But the question of fungibility of labor, from management's standpoint, in the world of social media is a tricky one. The culture and communities that live on popular social media platforms - the things that makes them valuable - are constantly shifting. As in most cultures and communities in the physical world, users frequently lament these shifts, blaming new entrants to the community or powerful authorities. If they hate the changes enough, they leave.
So, when moderators of a popular subreddit choose to go on strike, effectively killing that subreddit, what happens to its users?
One possibility is that they leave the platform. This is, I would think, what the mods are trying to accomplish - driving traffic off the platform, hurting Reddit's bottom line, and getting management some bad press. Another possibility is that the users of that subreddit migrate to other existing subreddits - ones with moderators that didn't strike - and find that these other subreddits are roughly as good at satisfying their need for distraction, information, community, amusement, comfort, etc., resulting in a surge of activity on those subreddits. Yet another possibility is that new subreddits arise to meet the demand created by the absence of striking subreddits. "Splinter" subreddits - subreddits that are created to cater to disgruntled "refugees" from a subreddit that has changed in some disagreeable way - have always been a part of the subreddit ecosystem. Modularity is a defining feature of Reddit, something that sets it apart from the single, amorphous conversation on Twitter and the atomized, fleeting comments on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. In this case, it makes it harder for labor to force management to do anything. Unless a critical degree of solidarity among moderators is reached and sustained (a tall order, given the number and diversity of subreddits), its hard to prevent within-platform user migration.
Reddit's design - a feed or list of posts aggregated from subreddits to which users subscribe - can make it hard to even notice the absence of a striking subreddit. When I went to the site, it took me awhile to realize what was missing; I was still seeing pictures of cute animals, funny things that people said or did, captivating vistas and infuriating news. Of course, the impact is going to vary from user to user. For some users, access to a particular subreddit can be as valuable as access to a close friend, one whose absence would result in a sense of profound loss. It's hard to see how many users are like that - management has an interest in making it seem as though they are a small, vocal minority while labor has an interest in making it seem as though most users are upset by the changes - so upset that they are already in the process of leaving.
It's possible that a large number of currently-popular subreddits die as a result of this disruption, and that a large number of users leave the platform and don't come back. It's easy to point to moribund platforms like Digg or MySpace that never found a replacement community that could sustain the business. But that doesn't take into account the current business climate for these businesses, news organizations, and even video and audio streaming services that seem (with varying degrees of success) to be training consumers to pay - in subscription fees or attention to ads - for what they consume. If the era of free high-quality user-generated-content is over, there may be no substitutable platform for disgruntled users to migrate to.
It also may underestimate how organic and unpredictable large groups of people are. We get used to versions of these platforms - used to seeing a certain type of post or comment at the top of the feed, the popularity of which reflects the collective sensibilities of a voting constituency of users. That sensibility persists even in the face of high turnover among contributors - it is generated not by a stable group of super-users but by a rotating cast who cater to the preferences of the constituency. Disruptions like the current one can change the voting constituencies and thus change what we see at the top of our feeds. Perhaps mods' lack of free access to APIs will make it effectively impossible to manage subreddits beyond a certain size (say, 1,000 active contributors), leading to a Reddit with no large communities and more moderately sized communities that, when they grow unmanageably large, spawn offshoots - something a bit more like Discord. That version of Reddit might be far more diverse in its interests and sensibilities, and ultimately more successful, than the version we're now accustomed to.
