Language learning technology’s (aka “AI”) introduction into journalism has been a blistering mess. And not just because the technology is undercooked (which it is), but because the folks in charge of most major media outlets are incompetent cheapskates who simply see the tech as a way to cut corners, wage war on labor, and automate all of the clickbait attention economy’s very worst impulses.
The result of that continues to go about how you’d expect, with a ton of rushed computer-generated articles filled with dumb mistakes.
But last week there was a fun wrinkle when users over at the r/wow subreddit tricked an “AI” scraping the web for news into publishing an article on a new World of Warcraft feature that doesn’t exist. The fans created an entirely new game mode and lore called Glorbo, talked about it as if it was a real thing in the subreddit, and got a website called The Portal, owned by Zleague.gg, to treat it like a real thing:
“The Portal, owned by Zleague.gg, ran an SEO item on Glorbo headlined “World of Warcraft (WoW) Players Excited for Glorbo’s Introduction”, quoting the main Reddit thread directly. Though it appears The Portal has since realised its mistake and removed the post, it can still be read in full on Archive.Today. The original post does not appear to denote that the story was automated. The author byline on the piece does not lead to a bio or social media links of any kind.”
While this was a fun prank related to gaming news, the same kind of lazy rushed implementation of “AI” is also occurring in the broader field of journalism. And while the tech may improve over time, the kind of greedy, incompetent leadership we’ve seen in media generally won’t.
There are plenty of ways these language learning tools could actually help journalists do a better, more efficient job. But we’re not injecting the technology into a healthy journalism and media environment. We’re injecting it into an already very broken clickbait bullshit generation machine, effectively supercharging all of its worst tendencies.
The goal for a lot of the VC types in media is to create a giant pointless ouroboros of clickbait gibberish and ad consumption that shits money. A giant wheel of pointless, often-manufactured engagement that is largely free of any pesky concerns about silly things like paying human beings a living wage, the quality of the end product, or the health of the broader industry.
Last week, we promised an upcoming episode featuring a conversation with Cory Doctorow — and that conversation has been recorded and is arriving next week! But we decided to take a brief intermission this week, since things in the social media landscape are changing so quickly. Mike recently appeared on The Neoliberal Podcast with Jeremiah Johnson to talk about the ongoing nonsense at Twitter, the dawn of Meta’s Threads, the situation at Reddit, and all the other chaos engulfing the world of social media. You can listen to the entire conversation right here on this week’s episode.
As you’ll recall, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman whined about what he called the “landed gentry” among moderators of subreddits that were protesting his ridiculous extractive API changes. He insisted that perhaps things should be more democratic. In response, many subreddits took a vote on how subscribers to those subreddits wanted the mods to handle things, and many urged the moderators to continue protesting.
But, Huffman apparently couldn’t handle that kind of democracy. So he’s spent the last few weeks threatening mods. The ultimatums ramped up over the weekend, after Reddit made it official that protesting mods who changed their subs to be labeled as NSFW (“not safe for work” meaning no ads can show) would be removed unless they changed back.
However, Reddit has sent messages to the mods of those subreddits saying they must “immediately correct” their NSFW labeling, claiming each community “has not historically been considered NSFW nor would they under our current policies.” If the designation isn’t corrected, any moderators involved in that decision will be removed. Those mods may be “subject to additional actions,” such as losing the ability to join future moderator teams.
Much democracy, very freedom.
It appears some mods have caved, saying they don’t know what else to do. But some are still holding out.
As of Thursday evening, r/PICS had dropped the NSFW designation, along with r/military.
In an email to The Verge, a moderator for the military subreddit said that the mods decided to revert the NSFW designation because the community is a helpful resource for veterans experiencing mental health crises. The mod said that if Reddit removed the team, it could put the community at risk.
The moderators r/PICS discussed remaining NSFW and awaiting removal, but decided instead to explore “alternative ways of adhering to Reddit’s vague and contradictory mandates and policies,” a mod wrote in a Reddit DM to The Verge. “To be clear, reverting the NSFW setting technically constitutes a violation of the site-wide rules (as they are currently written), but since Reddit has insisted, we have been left with no other option.”
The mods of r/Askwomenadvice, who also received the warning, instead plan to keep the designation and potentially face removal. “Anyone with two brain cells to rub together could do a quick look at the top posts, whether it’s by week, month, year, or all time, and see that our sub is peppered with NSFW topics,” one moderator wrote. “Our ethics won’t allow us in good faith to lie to you so Reddit can make a buck. So when the sub gets turned over to whatever scab steps forward, we hope they have the decency to run it in a way that keeps you safe.”
Meanwhile, now that the API changes have been put in place, and a bunch of tools have had to shut down, moderators for the /r/blind subreddit announced that their blind mods can no longer moderate the sub.
We have done absolutely everything we could to work with Reddit and have given them every opportunity. When they offered to host a demo of the update, we understood how little they understand about accessibility: they did not respond to a request to use the app with screen curtain on. The only fair conclusion is that they cannot use it without sight, but expect us to.
The update introduced various regressions and new bugs. This is entirely within the expectations of the mod team, given how rushed it was and how Reddit continues to demonstrate how underprepared they are to deal with accessibility.
While the group initially talked about moving elsewhere, for the time being they’re staying on Reddit, but all of the moderators on r/blind are now either sighted or visually impaired, as opposed to fully blind.
Seems like an ADA lawsuit waiting to happen, but hey, Huffman wants his IPO, so why not just toss out the blind moderators who are causing so much trouble.
Once again, things feel ripe for someone else to step in and fill the void of the enshittified Reddit. There are, of course, already attempts in the Fediverse with Lemmy, kbin and others. I’ve seen talk of building Reddit-like functionality into other decentralized protocols like nostr and ATproto. And, I’m sure that some others are looking at jumping in as well. For all we know, in a few months, Meta may launch its own Reddit competitor as well, just as they’ve slipped into the microblogging world with Threads.
The landed gentry are only in charge until the king comes to town and chops off a few heads. At least that seems to be the case at Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman pretended his complaints about current moderators — who were protesting his decision to effectively cut off API access to tons of useful tools by jacking up the price on it to unsupportable levels — was about making Reddit more “democratic.”
Except, that’s clearly not the case. For weeks now, Reddit has been ratcheting up the threats to various moderators of subreddits to try to force them to reopen.
The latest is that Reddit started contacting more mods of protesting subs (most have reopened, but many are still engaging in acts of protest) telling them they had 48 hours to tell the company their plans for reopening. Quickly after that, they issued an ultimatum: closed subreddits must reopen.
“This community remaining closed to its [millions of] members cannot continue” beyond the deadline, the admin (Reddit employee) account ModCodeofConduct wrote in a note to one of the biggest Reddit communities that’s still private.
After a mod replied, ModCodeofConduct went even further. “[Millions of] members have lost complete access to this community and that is not going to continue,” the account said. “Wanting to take time to consider future moderation plans is fine, but that must be done in at least a ‘restricted’ setting. This community will not remain private beyond the timeframe we’ve allowed for confirmation of plans here.”
In a conversation with moderators of a different subreddit, ModCodeofConduct told them that “continued violation of [Rule 4 of the Moderator Code of Conduct] over the next 31 hours will result in further action.” Rule 4 of that document is “Be Active and Engaged.” That subreddit has since reopened, though in an “archive” mode where new posts will be automatically removed.
The thing is, in many of these subreddits, the users voted in favor of going private. So, for all of Huffman’s nonsense talk about “democracy” and getting rid of what he preposterously called “the landed gentry,” the reality is the opposite. It’s Huffman’s way, or you’re out.
Indeed, there are already reports of Reddit admins being willing to help stage coups to oust protesting mods and install others in their place. Meanwhile, there’s talk of renewed protests on July 1st (the day the API changes go into effect), though who knows how well that will go.
Meanwhile, I’ve seen lots of reports noting that Redidt’s traffic, after an initial dip, has returned to normal, but it’s possible that some of that is just people gawking at the spectacle of the protesting subs that were covered in John Oliver images.
But, perhaps a more concerning issue regarding Huffman’s plans to take the company public in the near future, is that the same reports saying traffic has returned to normal, are noting that traffic to Reddit’s advertising portal… has dropped noticeably.
However, Similarweb told Gizmodo traffic to the ads.reddit.com portal, where advertisers can buy ads and measure their impact, has dipped. Before the first blackout began, the ads site averaged about 14,900 visits per day. Beginning on June 13, though, the ads site averaged about 11,800 visits per day, a 20% decrease.
For June 20 and 21, the most recent days for which Similarweb has estimates, the ads site got in the range of 7,500 to 9,000 visits, Carr explained, meaning that ad-buying traffic has continued to drop.
Next thing you know, we’ll be hearing that Huffman has hired Linda Yaccarino to be the new CEO….
If you’re a Techdirt reader, a Reddit user, or both, then you probably know all about the chaos engulfing the site as users and moderators of popular subreddits protest CEO Steve Huffman’s recent changes to the site’s API. This week, we’re joined by Jay Peters from The Verge to talk about the situation, the protests, and Huffman’s disastrous responses.
The enshittification of Reddit continues. Yesterday we wrote about the next move from protesting mods to switch their subs to NSFW, which strips those subreddits of ads, and how Reddit was experimenting with removing the mods who did that. For what it’s worth, just a few days ago, Reddit insisted in a comment that it wasn’t “threatening” mods with removal, and then just days later it literally did remove the mods, so nice going Reddit comms: you’ve completely fucked over whatever credibility you might have had.
That’s a discussion where a mod asks if “transitioning from SFW to NSFW is allowed” and the main admin account that interacts with moderators, ModCodeofConduct, replied:
Thanks for asking this, we’ll have messaging going out to affected communities later today. Changing a previously SFW community to a NSFW community in order to protest Reddit policies is inappropriate for members of your community and not acceptable overall. People subscribe to communities based on the content at the time of subscription. Communities can gradually change as they grow, but this is not what we are observing and not in the best interest of the users being subjected to that content.
Incorrectly marking your community is a violation of both our Content Policy (rule 6) as well as the Moderator Code of Conduct (rule 2).
This is similar to the language that was used by Reddit’s spokesperson a day earlier, accusing the mods of violating both the Content Policy (which, you’ll recall, Reddit took down for a while) and the Moderator Code of Conduct.
But… this excuse is bullshit. The content policy rule 6 reads:
Ensure people have predictable experiences on Reddit by properly labeling content and communities, particularly content that is graphic, sexually-explicit, or offensive.
Obviously, that’s for the reverse situation of what’s happening here. That rule is clearly designed to say that if you’re hosing NSFW content you can’t label your sub SFW. Spinning that around to say that subs labeling themselves as NSFW violates that policy is just ridiculous, obnoxious lawyering.
As for the Mod Code of Conduct Rule 2, that excuse is also bullshit. This rule is for the sub to “set appropriate and reasonable expectations” and then says:
Users who enter your community should know exactly what they’re getting into, and should not be surprised by what they encounter. It is critical to be transparent about what your community is and what your rules are in order to create stable and dynamic engagement among redditors.
And so, again, you could obnoxiously lawyer this and claim the switch goes against “expectations,” but in looking over various subreddits making this change, most of the ones I’ve seen held votes of their community and asked them what they wanted to do, and clearly stated their intentions to the members of that subreddit.
So, the blanket statement that switching to NSFW in protest violates those rules is clearly inauthentic bullshit.
Even worse, moderators are reporting that admins have started removing memes making fun of CEO Steve Huffman, as well as comments from angry Redditors repeating the “fuck u/spez” mantra (“spez” being Huffman’s username). They’re posting images of the ones that they claim are deleted. It’s unclear if those are actually being deleted or what’s going on, but Huffman has admitted in the past to editing comments that criticized him. And while he promised never to do it again and said he just did it out of frustration, I’m guessing he’s pretty damn frustrated right now.
Mods are continuing to fight back, and some are pointing out the ridiculous hypocrisy in all of this. For example, the mods of r/Canning (a subreddit for how to safely can food) said they received another threat from admins, and pointed out in response that they’re literally doing exactly what their community asked them to do, so to claim that they’re going against community wishes is bullshit:
The mods of r/Canning will continue to follow the wishes of our community first. If you wish us to make the subreddit public again, you will need to meet the demands of our users; to whit that you re-open discussion with 3rd party application developers, reduce your outrageous API pricing, and give them a minimum of 6 months before that pricing takes effect.
That is what the users have asked of us as their moderators. If you sincerely care about the “Subreddit belonging to the community of users” you will meet our demands, at which point we can discuss re-opening the subreddit. Should you prematurely force our subreddit public against the wishes of the vast majority of our users, our users will know the truth of the lie as to whom the subreddit really belongs.
In comments later in that thread, the mod from r/Canning points out that canning is a very tricky process, and done wrong can create real harm. They fear that if Reddit replaces them with mods who don’t know much, it could create real dangers. I’ve heard similar things from other mods of other subs as well. While certainly not all mods are perfect (many are far from), unilaterally dumping the most active ones and replacing them with corporate lapdogs creates real risks.
Or then there are the mods from r/PoliticalHumor who decided that if Huffman wants “democracy” rather than “landed gentry,” he’ll get it. They’ve made all members mods:
But, again, it’s incredible that someone needs to remind the dude who created Reddit how Reddit users react to any sort of threat to their way of doing things. Reddit is the place where the users don’t give a shit what you want. They want to fight for what’s right.
Perhaps Huffman is right that he’ll wait out his users. But I can’t see how any of this plays well for his investors, or how this speaks well of Reddit’s future as a community site.
It seems that we’ve had a rash of formerly loved internet services going down the enshittification curve. As coined (brilliantly) by Cory Doctorow, enshittification is the process by which a company gets gradually worse. As he puts it:
first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
And the progression down this curve is often driven by the (short term) demands of investors, but too often CEOs themselves embrace this curve. And, really, it’s not difficult to see how it happens.
In the early days, you’re an upstart. You’re building users and fans, and it’s the “don’t be evil” stage of an internet company’s life, where the focus is almost entirely on building users. And you do that by providing a great service, better than anything else out there (maybe even disrupting the business models of what’s out there). This excites everyone, including the media and investors who pour in money, subsidizing the company’s existence and rapid growth.
The second stage, then, is when you realize at some point all of this userbase and goodwill has to turn into some sort of business, so that often involves some “compromises” to make sure that you can actually make money. It may start innocently enough: you add in a few non-intrusive ads, or come up with some more creative business models, such as selling data from your users.
But, then the third stage comes, and the investors, who were so happy to give you that money to subsidize everything early on, start demanding their return. They need to see much more growth, and not just in the size of your userbase, but in how much money you’re able to make. You start learning acronyms like “ARPU” (average revenue per user) and such. And then you’re being measured on how much you’re increasing those metrics, which means you need to squeeze more out of each individual user, and you’re now deep within the enshittification stage, in which you’re trying to squeeze your users for more money each quarter (because now everything is judged in how well you did in the last 3 months to improve that number).
It’s happened to lots of platforms, but we’re seeing it happen in somewhat spectacular fashion with a few these days, mainly Twitter and Reddit, though I’d argue that Netflix could be included as well.
Doctorow has another sentence following the one I quoted above that is important here as well:
Then, they die.
That part doesn’t always happen. And some companies just linger on, dead company walking, for quite some time. But the main thing that the enshittification process does is open up new opportunities for new entrants to come in, and do so at the early stages of the curve, with a focus on delighting users, rather than squeezing them. And that’s where the opportunity is for the original companies to die.
Anyway, I’d like to posit seven basic rules for any internet CEO looking to avoid the enshittification death cycle. Think of these as the rules that Steve Huffman maybe should have learned years ago, rather than whatever the fuck he’s doing now.
Tell your investors that you’re in this for the long haul and they need to be too. This was a key part of Jeff Bezos’ success with Amazon. For years he was blatantly, almost obnoxiously, transparent with investors that he was focused on the long-term sustainability of Amazon, and he would not cut off benefits to Amazon’s customers in search of profitability. Among Wall St. folks, the oft-repeated line was “will Amazon ever make money?” When I was in business school in the 90s, a decently successful entrepreneur told me that Amazon was never going to succeed because Bezos was too focused on users, rather than profits. Instead, he suggested PointCast was the internet company that would succeed. How many people actually even remember PointCast? People forget that when Bezos introduced Amazon Prime, Wall St. flipped out, because they insisted that it would cost way too much for too little benefit. But, through it all Amazon survived (and thrived) because Bezos just kept telling investors exactly what his plan was, and never backed down, no matter what Wall St. kept saying to him.
Your community is everything. This is too easily forgotten, but your users are everything if you run an internet business. They’re not “the product.” They’re what makes your site useful and valuable, and often provide the best marketing you could never buy by convincing others to join and providing you with all of the best ideas on how to improve things and make your service even better for the users. The moment you’re undermining your own community, you’re beginning to spiral downward.
Create more value than you capture. This one is not mine, but Tim O’Reilly’s, and it’s one that constantly sticks with me. As you’re developing a business model, the best way to make sure that you’re serving your users best, and not enshittifying everything, is to constantly make sure that you’re only capturing some of the value you’re creating, and are instead putting much more out into the world, especially for your community. Your investors will push you to capture more and more of that value, but again, when you start chasing that, you’re also spiraling down the enshittification curve.
Empower your community, and then trust them. This may sound similar to rule number two, but it’s more about how you make the first rule a reality. Again, your own community is what’s making your service even more valuable, and helping to attract new users. So, make it easier for them to do that. Push the power to make your service better out from the service to the users themselves and watch what they do. Let them build. Let them improve your service. Let them make it work better for you. But, you have to have some trust here. If you’re focused on “Rule 3” you have to recognize that sometimes your users will create value that you don’t capture. Or even that someone else captures. But in the long run, it still flows back to you, as it makes your service that much more valuable.
Find ways to make money that don’t undermine the community or the experience. There are ways to do this. If you’ve built a strong community, they want you to survive. But you need to make sure that you’re creating ways to capture the part of the value you’re capturing in a manner that doesn’t harm the overall experience. Google did this in the early days with its non-intrusive contextual ads, but lost the plot on enshittification when it started sucking up as much extra data as it could to target you (and then seemed to cut off competitive routes for alternative ads to work). There are ways to monetize that don’t need to overwhelm, that don’t need to suck up every bit of data, that don’t need to rely on taking away features users relied on. Focus on adding more scarce value, and figuring out ways to charge for those new things which can’t be easily replicated.
Never charge for what was once free. This is a corollary to rule number five. If you’re charging for something that was once free, you’re taking away value from your community. You’re changing the nature of the bargain, and ripping away the trust that your community put in you. Instead, always look for something new that is worth paying for above and beyond what you already offered. Make it so that it’s worthwhile for people to pay, rather than acting like they need to pay you for the things they got for free until now. Give them a reason to pay gladly, don’t try to pressure them into coughing up money grudgingly.
Don’t insult the intelligence of your users. All too often, this is what it comes down to. When investors get on your case about how you have to squeeze more money out of each user, bad CEOs start trying to justify the clearly “bad for users” decisions that they’re making as actually being good for the users. Some, like Reddit’s Huffman, are so far gone that he just assumes that Reddit’s userbase wants him to make more money, rather than even trying to couch the borked API plans in some “it’s better for users” language. But, either way, be upfront with the community (remember, it’s the most important part of your site). If you need to make more money, rather than acting petulant about how unfair it is that you’re not making money, explain why you’re creating new services that provide new value, and why they’re priced as such. Be up front, transparent, and honest. Don’t talk down to them, and treat them as if they owe you. They don’t. They made your service what it is, and you should act accordingly.
There’s obviously a lot more to all of this, but keeping those seven principles in mind can create a path for CEOs of internet companies to continue delighting users and avoiding extreme enshittification. Of course, no one’s perfect, and every company is going to make mistakes. But if investors are pushing you to make more money now, figure out ways to do that by adding even more value to the world, rather than trying to squeeze your existing community, ripping away the things they love, and telling them you’re doing it for their own good. And, also, tell those investors that you’re doing this for the longer term health of the service, rather than just trying to get a quick buck out of the people who made your service so successful in the first place.
Reddit’s ongoing war with its volunteer moderators (and users) has moved up a notch. As you’ll recall, last week, the ever tone-deaf CEO Steve Huffman insisted that the protests were just a blip, would be over by last Wednesday, and were having no real impact on the site anyway.
That hasn’t gone quite to plan.
The protests got extended, and as Huffman and Reddit made noises about removing mods of protesting subreddits, things got weird over the weekend, with mods holding votes on a variety of subs that got overwhelming support to reopen with only pictures of comedian John Oliver. And some subreddits took it even farther, requiring they be sexy pictures of John Oliver.
And, from sexy pictures of John Oliver, it didn’t take long for some subreddits to switch to being open, but for NSFW (Not Safe for Work) content: i.e., porn. This included many popular subreddits that wouldn’t normally be home to such content, such as r/interestingasfuck, r/TIHI (Thanks I Hate It), r/formula1, r/videos and even r/iOS?
Of course, this impacts Reddit in multiple ways that probably aren’t great for Reddit, or Huffman’s desire to take the company public and help investors cash out. First, it effectively makes those subreddits private, as you can’t view NSFW subs unless you’re logged in and have confirmed that you’re over 18. So, that creates some friction. But, an even bigger deal is that Reddit does not post ads on NSFW subs:
Ads for adult-oriented products and services on Reddit are no longer permissible, and Not Safe For Work (typically referred to as NSFW) subreddits will no longer be eligible for ads or targeting.
As for the claims by Huffman that the protests were not having any real impact, well… the data suggests otherwise. No, it didn’t completely crash traffic to Reddit, but an analysis by Engadget, using SimilarWeb data, showed traffic definitely did drop during the protest. While the decline in unique visitors may not seem that much at 6.6%, the more important point was that the time spent on the platform dropped even more precipitously:
The day before the protest began, an average session on the website was about eight minutes and 31 seconds long. A day later, that metric fell to seven minutes and 17 seconds, or the lowest that stat has been in the past three years.
Any such drop does not look good for investors who would be looking at buying into the company’s “vision” if they’re going to buy equity on the open market.
I’m also kind of wondering if one of the reasons for the massive drop in time spent has to do with the well known fact that the answers to Google searches are often found… on Reddit. And if people are searching for information that takes them to a Reddit thread, in the past, they’d spend some time reading through the threads. But if they do a search, and then click through to find a sub closed or overwhelmed by John Oliver or porn, they might not stick around. And, certainly, some people have noticed that the Reddit protests are also making Google worse.
Given all this bad news, it looks like Reddit and Huffman dipped their toes in the water of trying to remove these moderators thumbing their nose at Huffman. A whole bunch of folks sent over a post on the r/ModCoord subreddit in which a mod from r/MildlyInteresting (one of the subs that switched to NSFW, with support from its community) suddenly found that the entire mod team was locked out of the subreddit.
I was preparing the sub to go live, but just after I switched it to NSFW, I was logged out of my account on every single platform and locked out. I can successfully reset my password, but it will nevertheless not let me login.
Following this, another mod posted our update instead. Right after, the u/ModCodeofConduct account removed the post and flipped the sub back to restricted instead of public. Then, the second moderator was also logged out of their account and locked out. Other mods tried to re-approve the post, one of them was promptly logged out and locked out as well.
A few minutes after, the entire team was removed from the subreddit without any prior communication of any kind. As it stands, at least three of us are literally locked out of our Reddit accounts and the other mods were only removed from the sub.
It appeared that other subreddits that had gone NSFW had the same thing happen, including r/TIHI and r/interestingasfuck.
After complaining, the mod team was told that they had received a 7-day suspension, with some excuse from Reddit about how it was done to “prevent subs spamming sexually explicit material” which the r/MildlyInteresting mods insisted was never the plan in the first place.
And, of course, just as all this started to go viral, someone at Reddit HQ realized how bad all this looked and reinstated the mods:
ModMail from a different admin (not ModCoC) explains that we were apparently “swept up in actions” that they were taking against “communities that were encouraging sexually explicit content”. Situation remains really unclear, and the fact we were a mistake does not excuse r/interestingasfuck being targeted or any of the other 5 subs.
There have been other reports that Reddit staff are deliberately changing subreddits back from NSFW to SFW. Even if the community voted to support the change to NSFW.
A spokesman for Reddit, Tim Rathschmidt, (who over the weekend insisted that Reddit’s threat to remove mods was no threat at all) continues to lie through his teeth with a quote to the Verge:
“Moderators incorrectly marking a community as NSFW is a violation of both our Content Policy and Moderator Code of Conduct,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt said to The Verge when asked about the suspended mods. He declined to comment when asked if Reddit removed the mods.
Rathschmidt also seemed to get a bit snippy when the Verge’s Jay Peters followed up:
Asked if Reddit could confirm the reinstatement, Rathschmidt declined, saying, “I’m not going to set a precedent of confirming with The Verge every action we do or don’t take to ensure users can access their communities.” He didn’t elaborate on how removing a subreddit’s entire moderation team with no communication ensures users can access their communities, particularly since they were never entirely inaccessible beyond the limitations imposed by Reddit itself.
And it appears that this was just the beginning. There were reports that Reddit pulled down its content policy page. And, as I write this, that appears to be the case. Here’s what it looked like yesterday, according to the Internet Archive:
And here’s what it looked like a few hours ago as I wrote this:
Just… gone. If you pull down the language menu, you find there’s no option for English.
This morning the content policy came back, but… still.
And that same Reddit post noted that subreddits switching to NSFW now receive a popup saying that “Content tag is pending until reviewed,” suggesting that Reddit admins are now blocking the changes:
Basically, for all of Huffman’s talk of “landed gentry,” he seems to have decided that he’s the emperor, and gets to make all the decisions now.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman really seems to underestimate the kinds of people who sign up to be Reddit mods, and their willingness to go to extreme lengths if you start pushing them. We’ve discussed the nonsensical nature of Huffman’s new API efforts, as well as his stupid response to the subreddit blackout which caused many subreddits to remain on strike. We also discussed his incredibly entitled position about how third party apps that made his site more valuable owe him money.
But, incredibly, Huffman seems unable to stop digging.
After initially suggesting that he would create policies to allow Reddit users to “vote out” moderators who were striking (in the mistaken belief that “ordinary” Reddit users didn’t support the strike), Reddit sent out a not very subtle threat letter to moderators of the still striking communities.
The whole letter stinks of traditional union-busting practices, starting off with an attempt to divide the striking mods to see if the company can peel some away from the strikes:
We are also aware that some members of your mod team have expressed that they want to close your community indefinitely. We are reaching out to find out if this is the consensus reached by the mod team.
Subreddits exist for the benefit of the community of users who come to them for support and belonging and in the end, moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust. Your users rely on your community for information, support, entertainment, and finding connection with others who have similar interests. Ensuring that communities are able to remain stable and actively moderated is incredibly important to the people seeking out these spaces to make and foster connections.
Then the threat, worded in a way such that Reddit could later pretend it wasn’t actually a threat:
If there are mods here who are willing to work towards reopening this community, we are willing to work with you to process a Top Mod Removal request or reorder the mod team to achieve this goal if mods higher up the list are hindering reopening. We would handle this request and any retaliation attempts here in this modmail chain immediately.
Our goal is to work with the existing mod team to find a path forward and make sure your subreddit is made available for the community which makes its home here. If you are not able or willing to reopen and maintain the community, please let us know.
And, of course, after this letter became public, Reddit pretended there was nothing at all threatening about it:
“We have not threatened anyone,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt said in a statement to The Verge. “That’s not how we operate. Pressuring people is not our goal. We’re communicating expectations and how things work. Redditors want to reddit and mods want to mod. We want mods who want to mod to be able to do so.”
Come on, Tim. None of us were born yesterday. Everyone knows it was a threat to remove striking mods.
And, of course, all any of this does is continue to erode trust in the platform. As Scharon Harding over at Ars Technica rightly notes:
Reddit’s battle with devs, mods, and users is just the most recent version of the struggle. Reddit felt like something that the community built with the company, but while Reddit was happy to offload the responsibility for content creation, moderation, and (until recently) app development to third parties, it wasn’t willing to hand over real power.
Sudden, unaffordable API pricing (Reddit will charge $12,000 for 50 million API requests) and Reddit’s obstinacy are also harsh warnings to devs about the risks of building something totally reliant on a platform they don’t own. Many devs thought Reddit would always allow reasonable pricing for its API and have put in years of work based on that assumption. In the future, devs should think twice about building products based on properties they can’t control, assuming a company will always be supportive and reasonable (or even agreeing with them about what “supportive” and “reasonable” mean). That could mean a future where devs are far less incentivized to create innovations.
But hell hath no fury like a Redditor being jacked around by clueless pointy-haired bosses, and the mods struck back. Given the clear (yes, Tim Rathschmidt) threat of replacing of striking mods, possibly through a sketchy “voting” process to remove, as Huffman ridiculously called them, “the landed gentry, two of the biggest striking subreddits held a vote, just like Huffman wanted. Okay, well maybe not “just like” he wanted. Instead, r/GIFs and r/pics held a poll on whether they should “return to normal” or “only allow images featuring John Oliver.”
Let’s just say that Huffman’s belief that the average Redditor just wanted things to return to normal showed a profound misunderstanding of the average Redditor’s desire for funny chaos over helping a company make money. Here’s how the vote on r/GIFs went:
Yes, that shows “return to normal’“ receiving NEGATIVE 1,851 votes, while the John Oliver solution received 13,696 votes. Other subreddits joined in the fun and the results were even more extreme. r/pics voted for John Oliver pics with a vote of 37,331 against negative 2,329. Of course, r/pics went beyond the r/GIFs requirement of just being pics of John Oliver to them having to be sexy.
Then r/aww joined in as well, with its community voting in favor of only “adorable” pics of John Oliver (or his adorable Japanese mascot Chiijohn), with the Oliver pics winning by an even larger vote: 48,506 in favor and negative 2,691 voting to return to normal:
Oliver took to Twitter (unfortunately…) to support the Reddit protests, saying “have at it”:
He then included 10 photos of himself that would aid the cause. Here are a few:
And, of course, other subreddits are joining in as well, including r/Piracy, which has said that “only sexy pirate John Oliver artwork” may be posted.
Scrolling through the various subreddits, all you see are pics of John Oliver, including some that are arguably not entirely safe for work (depending on where you work, of course).
Meanwhile, Steve “this will pass” Huffman may have even more pressing matters at hand as a ransomware group has said that it will release a bunch of leaked Reddit data if the company doesn’t roll back its API policy changes (and pay the hackers $4.5 million).
Not to condone the hacking/ransom demands, but seems like the company might have been better off not pissing off its most active users?
Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, has decided to just keep on talking. After his disastrous AMA helped inspire more subreddits to join a 48 hour blackout, and his dismissal of the protesting subreddits as something not worth paying attention to resulted in many subreddits extending their protests indefinitely, Huffman apparently thought it would make sense to go do a bunch of interviews and insult the protesting mods some more. We’ll start with the interview he did with NPR which is just dripping with entitlement.
First he dismisses this as a “business decision” that some users didn’t like:
“It’s a small group that’s very upset, and there’s no way around that. We made a business decision that upset them,” Huffman told NPR in his first interview since nearly 9,000 subreddits staged a 48-hour boycott. “But I think the greater Reddit community just wants to participate with their fellow community members.”
I mean, the second part is correct, of course. But it’s also besides the point. Of course the greater Reddit community just wants to participate. But the reason they’re protesting is because Huffman’s own decision to effectively cut off their API makes it more difficult to participate.
And, again, this kind of waving away the protest is insulting:
“The protest, what it really affects is the everyday users, most of whom aren’t involved in this or the changes that spurred this,” Huffman said.
No shit. Of course most users aren’t involved in this, but it’s the people who understand how much damage this does to the site — generally the most passionate users of the platform — who are trying to make the point and get the word out.
But, really, the line that got me the most was this one:
“Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things,” Huffman said. “We are not in the business of giving that away for free.”
I mean holy shit dude. Do you listen to yourself? Where did that “data set of just human beings talking about interesting things” come from? It came from millions of people who gave you that content for free. And many of them used the site through third party apps because those apps made your site much more useful without charging you a dime.
The entitlement of Huffman is astounding.
He got free content and free app development work and now he’s going around whining about how “we’re not in the business of giving that away for free.”
Yikes.
Then he did an interview with NBC News, where he talks about his plan to strip protesting moderators from their subreddits and hand them over to others. Now, he’s correct that sometimes subreddit mods can be little power-hungry dictators (I still remember how Techdirt got banned from r/technology years ago for no reason beyond the fact that one old mod didn’t like us), but that’s not why he’s doing this. He’s doing it to get back at the protesting mods:
Huffman said in an interview that he plans to institute rules changes that would allow Reddit users to vote out moderators who have overseen the protest, comparing them to a “landed gentry.”
He’s even using that same bullshit language that Elon Musk used. Remember how Musk talked about “lords and peasants.” And now Huffman is talking about “landed gentry.” In both cases, these are the guys in full control over their platforms, the literal dictators, and they’re simply trying to set their users against those who have provided massive value to the site for years for free. It’s disgusting.
“So the vast majority of the uses of the API — not [third-party apps like Apollo for Reddit] — the other 98 percent of them, make tools, bots, enhancements to Reddit. That’s what the API is for,” Huffman says. “It was never designed to support third-party apps.”
I mean, you say that now, but that’s clearly bullshit. The reason those third party apps exist is because Reddit was insanely late to the game in offering its own app. And many of the apps made the site itself way more useful and valuable.
Yes, he’s now saying that, as a business matter, those apps are now costing him money, because users aren’t seeing the ads. But there are better ways of dealing with that than just making it prohibitively expensive to offer such an app. Reddit could build in more native ads, or it could offer third party apps additional useful features that cost money. Instead, Huffman is engaging in the cardinal sin of the internet: trying to charge for something that has always been free. And acting as if he’s entitled to that money, and it’s the people who don’t want to pay who are the problem.
And, again, Huffman seems like all entitlement all the time:
“They need to pay for this. That is fair.”
I mean… the users of Reddit could just as easily turn around and say the same thing to Huffman for all the free labor, content, and data they’ve provided to him.
For years I’ve really respected Reddit. It seemed like another one of those companies that really respected the open internet and often fought for it. Reddit was critical a decade ago in supporting the fight against SOPA. The legal and policy people I knew who worked at Reddit all seemed really committed to fighting for the open internet.
And here’s Huffman throwing away all that goodwill, pissing on the open internet, and saying he’s going to lock up his site that benefited so much from the open internet by trying to force companies to pay for it.
Throughout the interview he just gives these entitled quotes one after another, acting as if all the users are his and that he owns everything they’ve ever written. He acts as if they’re ungrateful for using better third party apps and not being “on our advertising platform.” Really:
“And the opportunity cost of not having those users on our platform, on our advertising platform, is really significant,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s simply expensive to run an app like Reddit.”
And then there’s this:
“We’re 18 years old,” Huffman said. “I think it’s time we grow up and behave like an adult company.”
You want to “grow up” and “behave like an adult company”? Really? Then maybe don’t piss on all the work your own community members and mods put into that company for free, and stop treating them as if their only value is as revenue generators.
That’s acting like an adult. What Huffman is doing now is acting like a child. A spoiled, entitled, child.
