Reddit’s CEO criticises protest leaders and vows to reform the “landed gentry”-favoring policies
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman stated in an interview with blogtweets News that a user protest taking place on the site this week is being led by a small group of moderators and does not have widespread backing.
The prominent website’s influential website has been largely inaccessible this week due to a user-led protest, which Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said he wants to put an end to on Thursday. In an interview, Huffman said he intended to amend the rules so that Reddit users could vote off the moderators who had been in charge of the protest, likening them to a “landed gentry.”
Starting on Monday, the protest forced the removal of thousands of message boards, or subreddits, and some groups claim they will keep doing so indefinitely. Reddit’s volunteer, unpaid moderators, who have extensive authority over how their subreddits are managed, have taken the initiative. Communities that participated became “private,” making them invisible to members as well. The protesters’ actions have slowed down a large portion of the website because they oppose changes that would most likely prevent them from accessing Reddit through third-party apps.
Huffman, who is also a co-founder of Reddit, stated that he intends to explore modifications to Reddit’s moderator removal rules so that common users can more easily vote moderators out if their judgements are unpopular. The new method, according to him, would be more democratic and give a larger range of individuals the ability to hold moderators accountable.
According to Reddit’s current policy, moderators may be fired for inactivity or breaking the site’s rules by higher-ranking moderators or Reddit itself. They may also take themselves out. Many people have been in their jobs for many years.
“Whether you own a business or are a politician, you have a responsibility to your customers. In other words, a business owner can be fired by its shareholders but a politician must be elected.
The analogy on Reddit, in my opinion, is more akin to the landed gentry: It is not democratic for the first to arrive to keep what they have and pass it on to their offspring.
The great degree of power that moderators have over their communities, according to them, is well justified given the hours of unpaid work they’ve put into creating and enforcing rules on their subreddits. Any strategy to lessen their influence risks creating new opposition.
The protest’s leaders may have had widespread support when it began on Monday, but Huffman, who helped launch Reddit 18 years ago this month, thinks they have lost most of it since.
Even while the protest’s leaders initially enjoyed widespread support, they have since lost the majority of it.
Making sure that, for instance, the protests, today or in the future, are truly representative of their communities is one thing that is “really important,” he said. And while I believe that may have been the case for many at the start of this week, it is becoming less and less so.
He claimed that after what was meant to be a two-day content strike on Monday and Tuesday, around 80% of Reddit’s top 5,000 communities are again operational. However, some of the largest subreddits’ moderators have prolonged their protests by remaining inaccessible in “private” mode, including the most popular one, r/funny.
In a statement this week headlined cblackout organisers explained their extension and stated that “our core concerns still aren’t satisfied.” Internal memos suggest that Reddit believes they can wait us out because they haven’t said anything since the protest started.
According to Huffman, the members should actually vote on those decisions.
More democracy is what I’m advocating as a way forward, he remarked. We need to sort of work our way out of these old, legacy decisions about how communities are administered.
He said other subreddits might halt their protests willingly first and provided no deadline for any adjustments. We’re letting that unfold because, in his words, “I think most will get there through their own natural decision-making process.”
Huffman stated he wasn’t thinking about making changes that would consolidate authority within Reddit as a business, such having Reddit’s paid personnel handle additional moderating responsibilities.
The uprising this week is a reaction to one of Reddit’s commercial strategies. Reddit has long been one of the most well-liked websites on the internet, with devoted members and a significant influence on web culture, but it hasn’t generated anywhere like the revenue of businesses that would typically be considered its tech counterparts, like Instagram and YouTube.
Reddit’s annual income is less than $1 billion, according to an interview with Huffman on Thursday. Huffman has claimed that Reddit is not profitable. Facebook and Instagram’s owner, Meta, recorded $116.6 billion in revenue for the previous year.
Reddit intends to start charging other companies more money for access to its application programming interface, or API, the software that enables apps to communicate with one another, in order to increase income and decrease expenses.
This would likely put an end to third-party apps like Apollo and RIF, formerly known as Reddit Is Fun, which some users use to access and post on Reddit. These rival apps frequently lack advertisements.
Huffman claimed he has no pity for the rival apps who seek to access Reddit’s content without running advertising, which are the main revenue generator for the website.
“Running an app like Reddit is expensive. We fund it via advertisements. And we can’t support other people’s businesses so that we can offer a competitive app for free, he added.
He refrained from making any predictions about the timing of a future IPO (initial public offering of stock).
“One day, when the market and the business are ready, I want to arrive there. We’ll arrive when we arrive, he said.
Users of Reddit who oppose changes to the site are unrealistic, in his opinion.
Looking back on Reddit from 18 years ago, it was primarily made up of American techno-libertarians in their 20s who were 98% men. Because I was one of them, I can say that,” Huffman said.
However, Huffman stated that he would prefer some sort of revenue-sharing.
He remarked, “I would like subreddits to be able to be businesses if they choose,” and that was “another conversation, but I think that’s the next frontier of Reddit.”
While Huffman claimed that his choices about the protest and the API changes were made with the company’s financial health in mind, losing the support of Reddit’s moderators might have a price.
Three computer scientists’ research from last year found that volunteer Reddit moderators put in at least 466 hours every day. The study found that if they were paid $20 per hour, the cost would be $3.4 million, or 3% of Reddit’s 2019 revenue.
Last year, 58% of content that broke Reddit’s rules was deleted by the site’s volunteer moderators, or “mods,” according to the business. 39% of the content was deleted by Reddit staff members, or “admins,” and the remaining was deleted by authors.
Occasionally, the removal of moderators generates news stories. A moderator of r/antiwork was fired last year for what some viewed as a tone-deaf interview with Fox News. Moderators fought for control of the r/wallstreetbets subreddit, which had sparked a string of Wall Street trading frenzys, partly due to the prospect of a movie deal.
