In the late hours of Tuesday, the moderators of the popular Reddit community r/Gaming made a significant decision. They opted to take the community offline, implementing a 48-hour blackout for its extensive user base of over 37 million members.
This action was part of a larger protest against Reddit’s impending business change, which involved a substantial increase in pricing for third-party developers seeking to utilize the company’s application programming interface (API). The r/Gaming moderators had conducted a poll beforehand, indicating widespread support for the shutdown. After discussing the results on Slack, they proceeded to initiate the blackout.
The protest quickly spread across the platform, encompassing more than 8,000 subreddits, including renowned communities like r/Funny, boasting over 40 million members, and r/Music and r/Science, each with over 30 million users.
The moderators’ solidarity with outside developers was accompanied by concerns that the essential tools they rely on to manage their communities might become unavailable due to the new pricing structure. These third-party apps are pivotal for moderators, facilitating various tasks such as subreddit organization, spam account blocking, flagging unsafe posts, identifying patterns of harassment and abuse, and facilitating on-the-go communication with members.
Unlike platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, Reddit heavily relies on independent developers rather than in-house employees to provide these critical services that ensure the platform’s functionality for both moderators and users. Dac Croach (Dacvak), one of the moderators, highlighted Reddit’s unique reliance on hundreds of thousands of volunteers who dedicate countless hours to maintain a safe, entertaining, and enjoyable site experience. The apparent disregard for their voices in the face of this protest is disheartening.
This sentiment resonates throughout the Reddit community, as CNBC’s interviews with numerous moderators, including those overseeing the platform’s largest communities, have revealed. The controversy exposes the increasingly strained relationship between Reddit’s leadership, which has been steadily advancing towards an IPO, and the platform’s external supporters. These supporters have played a crucial role in maintaining over 100,000 active communities that collectively attract more than 500 million monthly visitors from around the world.
