When subreddits go dark

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.

Reddit, Gawker, and The Freedom to Say Horrible Things

As a Redditor and someone who is interested in how online communities work, it’s been fascinating/sad to see what happened at Reddit over the past couple of weeks.

The initial decision by the company to fire a beloved employee touched off an angry user rebellion which eventually led to the harassment of CEO Ellen Pao by a smaller group of users and the CEO’s eventual resignation. The whole series of incidents revealed to me that Reddit consists of two factions that can be defined by how upset they were at Pao. These factions always existed, but recent events make the differences more visible.

It’s important to note that the size of these two factions are not as easy to measure as it initially seems. The highly vocal, negative anti-Pao sentiment (and, more generally, strong emotions about anything) is conspicuous while the size of the other, less vocal group must be inferred by the fact that the vast majority of content on the site has nothing to do with Pao or the recent controversy. The first group is much more highly invested in the site than the second group – it likely consists of a greater proportion of moderators, heavy users of the site, and people who bother to up/downvote Pao-related posts. But the second group is likely larger. The first group consists of “strange bedfellows”: those with legitimate gripes about the seemingly arbitrary and poorly communicated decisions of their leader and those who are simply predisposed to expressing hatred. 

The small group of people with ill will is influencing the fate of the site, but it isn't being done directly through the upvoting/downvoting of content or through posts or comments on the site. Instead, sites like Gawker and traditional news coverage focus on the small, vocal group with ill will and drive public perception of the entire site, which influences who participates or invests in the website. 

The misperception of Reddit promulgated by news stories is so beguiling in part because people judge online communities in much the same way that they judge offline communities. But Reddit isn’t a community in the ways that offline groupings of people like universities, neighborhoods or even countries are communities. It isn’t structured to be one shared experience or reflect a single, shared set of values. Proof of this: my experience of using Reddit changed very little during this upheaval (it was still mostly pictures of delicious hamburgers, science AMAs, and gifs of hilarious failed attempts at handshakes). By creating self-organizing sub-communities or "sub-reddits", the structure of Reddit (and perhaps the structure of other decentralized social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) facilitate distinct, individualized experiences. However, thanks to stories like the one in Gawker, this reality may ultimately matter less than public perception. 

And so I couldn't help but relish the irony when Gawker, immediately after mocking Reddit for having a crisis over what to do with hurtful, hateful content, had a crisis of its own when editor Tommy Craggs resigned after the Founder and CEO pulled a hurtful, hateful piece of content without consulting him. 

The cynical take on what happened at Reddit and Gawker is that these websites are getting popular and trying to make the next step toward profitability, making themselves appealing to advertisers by sanding off their rough edges and eliminating some types of content that the websites used to tolerate. In doing so, they are compromising the values of free speech and/or independent journalism. Gawker CEO Nick Denton states in an email to one of his employees that "These are the stories we used to do. But times have changed." Does this refer to the commercialization of Gawker and similar websites, or does it refer to the maturation of some of its leaders, a maturation which helped them realize that there are values other than free speech and getting web traffic, values like a consideration of the harm that words can do to others even when they are protected by law, and that sometimes these values come into conflict. Perhaps the phrase "times have changed" refers to both changes. Perhaps two forces - the commercial and the compassionate - are actually pushing in the same direction for once, against hurtful content, leaving libertarians on the other side, opposing both commerce and compassion (I don't like those odds).

In both the Reddit case and the Gawker case, the way in which the decisions to alter content were made (in a kind of sloppy, ad hoc way) left the company open to criticism. Personally, I side with the upper management of Reddit in their cleansing their site of hateful speech. With Gawker, it's trickier. I suppose I feel that they set themselves up by posting news stories that had so little value to begin with and were so obviously hurtful of others. Denton found himself, as he notes, in an impossible position: he had to either run a story that was "pure poison" to the reputation of the Gawker brand or know that some of his talent would resign in protest after he pulled the article.

But I think the major takeaway from this may be that the conflict at Gawker, like the conflict at Reddit, was kind of inevitable. You have hurtful content, and when you're small and the mainstream media doesn't draw attention to this content, you can get away with this. But once you get big and the eyes are on you, you either become associated with hurtful content or you change the brand's identity by restricting content, firing those who won't comply, and alienating part of your core users. Though I don't have that much sympathy for Denton, I find his remark about balancing the "calculus of cruelty and benefit" to be an encouraging sign for a purveyor of prurience (one that sounds oddly similar to Institutional Review Boards' policy regarding balancing risk and benefit in scientific studies).

To be sure, you can still say horrible, hurtful things on the Internet. Which raises the question: Where do Tommy Craggs and the libertarians leaving Reddit go? Do they all go to someplace like Vice Media? What does Vice do when all this happens to them? Is hate like energy: incapable of being created or destroyed, only redirected?