Reddit CEO slams moderators during blackout, compares them to aristocracy
The company’s move sparked a backlash from Reddit moderators and users, who responded by taking down about 9,000 subreddit message boards for 48 hours. Some moderators have indicated that their subreddits will remain blacked out indefinitely in protest.
Huffman, a Reddit founder, has downplayed concerns about the protest, telling employees in an internal memo Monday that the blackout “will pass” as “all explosions on Reddit,” according to the Verge.
Huffman took aim at the moderators who led the blackout in an interview with NBC News on Thursday, saying he was looking to change the site’s policies to allow subreddit users to oust moderators more easily. Reddit spokesman Tim Rathschmidt told The Washington Post on Friday that the comment was taken out of context and that “Steve did not confirm that we are moving in this direction.”
Huffman compared the moderators to “landed gentry” and said they were not held accountable.
“If you’re a politician or a business owner, you’re accountable to your constituents. So a politician has to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by his shareholders,” he told NBC. “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed lord: The people who first get there get to stay there and pass it on to their descendants, and that’s not democratic.”
Huffman also told the Verge that the protests “are not representative of the larger Reddit community.” More than 80 percent of Reddit’s top 5,000 communities remain open on a site with more than 57 million daily users, according to a fact sheet published by the company on Thursday.
The group of Reddit moderators organizing the blackout on the r/ModCoord subreddit wrote in a post that Huffman’s comments illustrated that “Reddit’s communication has been poor from the beginning” about its plans to charge for data.
“They’ve tried to let us know they want to keep third-party apps while setting prices and timelines no developers can meet. The backlash happening now is largely because Reddit rolled out this drastic change with only 30 days notice,” wrote Reddit- user BuckRowdy, a moderator for the subreddit coordinating the protest, said Thursday.“We continue to ask Reddit to put these changes on hold and explore a real path forward that strikes a balance that is best for the widest range of Reddit users.”
Reddit spokesman Rathschmidt told The Post that the site has been in contact with “a number of communities to clarify any confusion surrounding our data. [application programming interface] Terms, platform-wide guidelines, community support resources, and timing for new moderator tools.”
“We are not removing moderators who protest, nor are we taking over subreddits to participate in the blackout,” he said, adding, “Redditors want reddit.”
The blackout comes at a crucial time for the social media giant, which was valued at $10 billion when it landed $1 billion in fundraising in August 2021. In April, Fidelity, the lead investor in this fundraising boom, announced it had cut its valuation on the company by 41 percent , according to TechCrunch.
That same month, Reddit announced it would begin charging third-party sites for API access, suggesting the move is essential to respond to generative AI companies like ChatGPT that can scrape sites and potentially duplicate content for nothing in return.
But the conversation surrounding the move changed in late May, when Christian Selig, the developer behind Apollo, one of the most popular third-party apps, said Reddit would charge him an estimated $20 million a year for data access. Third-party apps like Apollo are often ad-free, meaning the decision by Reddit essentially ended Selig’s business.
“I fail to see how this price is based on reality or remotely reasonable,” Selig wrote on May 31. “I hope it goes without saying that I don’t have that kind of money or even know how to charge it to a credit card.”
Selig announced last week that Apollo would close on June 30 before the price change takes effect. Several other third-party apps followed suit with similar announcements to shut down before July 1.
“The obstacles placed on third-party apps by Reddit are just not a feasible obstacle to overcome,” wrote Tony Lupeski, the developer of ReddPlanet.
Since then, Huffman has faced backlash for how the company handled the decision to charge for data. The rallying cry for the coordinated backlash was consistent: “Don’t let Reddit kill third-party apps!” Blackout even caused Reddit to crash temporarily because the site couldn’t handle all the subreddits going private.
Huffman acknowledged to the Verge that he took the “bashing” in an Ask Me Anything post he made on the platform last week defending Reddit’s plans. But he maintains that it is not Reddit’s responsibility to help keep third-party apps alive.
“It costs a lot of money to run an app like Reddit,” he told NBC. “We support ours through advertising. And what we can’t do is subsidize other people’s businesses to run a competitive app for free.”
Huffman told NPR that the blackout effort was led by “a small group that is very upset, and there’s no way around it.” He said the protest caused “a fair amount of trouble” but did not cost the company much money.
“We made a business decision that upset them,” Huffman said. “But I think the larger Reddit community just wants to participate with their fellow community members.”
However, some moderators say the problem is much bigger than the CEO is making it out to be. Some have said that moderators’ high-level control of subreddits comes from the hours of free labor they put into managing the message boards. Reddit user SpicyThunder335, a moderator for six subreddits and the forum coordinating the protest, wrote that more than 300 subreddits “have already announced that they are in it for the long haul, prepared to remain private or otherwise unavailable indefinitely until Reddit provides an adequate solution.”
In his interviews, Huffman said the blackout could be a good thing for a company that will turn 18 in the coming days.
“I think it’s time for us to grow up and act like a grown-up company,” Huffman told NPR.
As the July 1 change approaches, it is unclear how long the blackout will last. Reddit user Karmanacht summed up the mission of the moderator group in a few words: “For now, the protest will not end very soon.”
