Lately, protests about changes to Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) on platforms such as Twitter and Reddit have dominated technology news headlines. Users protesting changes to social media platforms isn’t a new phenomenon, but Reddit is different from other social media applications. Like Wikipedia, Reddit relies on volunteer labor to create and moderate the site’s content. Reddit is composed of thousands of public forums called subreddits, created and controlled by volunteer moderators that allow users to post content and comment. The content and comments on subreddits are reviewed and approved or removed by subreddit moderators, who police the subreddits for free. Reddit is a busy site, with millions of users creating content and commenting on each other’s posts every minute. However, drastic changes to Reddit’s API have moderators and users in an uproar. The focus of the site has shifted away from content, instead prioritizing the sale of data for AI purposes. Following in Twitter’s footsteps, Reddit is limiting access to content on its platform by requiring third-party companies to pay for access. But when the free labor that keeps the site relevant and fun dwindles due to mistreatment, it causes cascading issues that lead to unforeseen consequences.
Moderating a large social media site like Reddit is not easy. Moderators tend to live in North America, though Reddit is a worldwide site with large user groups in Australia, Europe, North America, South America and Asia. To help comb the subreddits for inappropriate posts and comments at all times of the day and night, moderators developed “bots,” automatic programs that monitor comments, posts and user actions, automatically reporting any issues to the moderators. Bots also track and ban spam posters and users who post on problematic subreddits, which is vital to keeping Reddit usable.
API, or Application Programming Interface, refers to third-party applications that access social media content. These third-party apps ingest content and comments and present them in a more accessible format. Reddit’s recent API changes include charging a high dollar amount for third-party applications to access Reddit’s API, potentially costing those companies millions of dollars each month. Charging such a high cost to access Reddit’s API affects all users. Many third-party companies, like Apollo and Baconreader, have shut down in response to this ludicrous API charge. More importantly, disabled moderators and users can no longer use the third-party applications that made Reddit accessible. Armory, Apollo and Boost all offered significantly increased access to Reddit for disabled users, but have gone offline in response to the API changes. One in four Americans is disabled, and Reddit’s official app is not well-designed to be accessible to users with disabilities. When confronted about the effects of these changes on disabled moderators and users, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said, “We will do better.” However, no accessibility changes have been made since that paltry promise. When hundreds of subreddit moderators protested the loss of accessibility for disabled users, Huffman responded by calling them “landed gentry,” a completely out-of-touch phrase that hardly applies to a volunteer labor force.
Reddit moderators and users have made their discontent with the API changes known to the CEO by engaging in protests across the site. The protests were initially conceived as 48-hour blackouts, but quickly evolved. Over 6,000 subreddits went dark at the beginning of the demonstrations, and over 2,500 were still offline more than two weeks later. Other subreddits asked users to vote about whether to completely delete the subreddit and its content. Some popular subreddits, such as r/Pics, r/BestofRedditorUpdates and r/Aww, protested by posting pictures of only John Oliver. r/Pics, one of the most popular subreddits in the last 10 years, remains a dedicated John Oliver subreddit at the time of this article’s publication. Other popular subreddits, such as r/TIHI, r/Formula1 and r/Videos, marked themselves NSFW (“Not Safe For Work”), a designation that makes the subreddit ineligible for advertising and restricts access to users 18 years or older. This last form of protest garnered the strongest reaction from Reddit administrators because it impacted the site’s ability to make money from advertising. As a response to the NSFW protests, Reddit forcibly removed moderators from popular subreddits and re-opened them to advertisements again. Most of the moderators who participated in early protests were removed from the site permanently. Since then, the quality of content, the number of visitors and the amount of ad traffic on Reddit have all fallen dramatically.
Reddit’s API changes have caused some to turn to apps like Mastodon and BlueSky, which are more user-centric social media platforms that access the “fediverse.” The fediverse, or “federated universe,” allows users to communicate in decentralized servers, so content cannot be determined by a central authority. Because it’s controlled by users, the fediverse allows for social media connections to grow larger than any single company. The connections are made by user-to-user contact that is not dependent on the facilitation of a social media company. The impact of AI is vast, and the future of social media is uncertain. But as protests and mistreatment drag on, the path ahead for Reddit appears rocky indeed.
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