A strike of sorts began on Reddit on June 12, when thousands of volunteer moderators set their forums to private, temporarily depriving users of the ability to bathe themselves in the minutiae of such groups as r/Gaming, r/Piano or r/IDontWorkHereLady. While many forums—subreddits, in Redditese—have come back online, others are still not functioning normally, and some of the fans of the site have been questioning whether this is the beginning of the end.
The trouble started when Reddit, which began setting the stage for an IPO in late 2021, announced a plan to begin charging businesses and developers for access to its application programming interface (API), an existing tool through which they can gain access to Reddit content to build their own products and services. As the details of the plan became clear, many moderators concluded the effort would break Reddit in key ways and pressed co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Steve Huffman to change course. He refused, the subreddits went private, and the two sides exchanged public vitriol while trying to iron things out behind the scenes.
Reddit was started in 2005 and sold to Condé Nast a year later. It’s now an independent company, but counts Advance Publications Inc., Condé Nast’s parent, as its biggest shareholder. The site, which operates as a collection of message boards and relies largely on advertising for revenue, periodically descends into flame wars between moderators and management, and it’s tempting to interpret what’s happening solely through the lens of the persistent weirdness of the Reddit culture. This is not the sort of thing, after all, that happens on Snapchat or Instagram.
But the freakout also exposes deepening tensions online. The souring market for digital ads, the end of zero-interest-rate optimism and the looming upheavals of artificial intelligence are changing the calculations at internet companies that haven’t yet figured out how to convert large audiences into sustainable profits. “People are anticipating that there’s a change in the economy of the internet coming,” says Alondra Nelson, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study who served as acting director for the Biden administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. She likens the Reddit moderator protest to the Hollywood writers’ strike, describing both as responses to an unsatisfactory status quo that also seek to set the groundwork for addressing their concerns about AI. “There’s a sense that people know that there’s only these collective efforts that might be able to move the needle at all, and they may not even succeed.”
When the company first announced the policy change in April, a lot of the focus was on how the move would ensure the company was compensated when its content was used to train generative AI models like the ones that run ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. Reddit data is of particular use to companies training chatbots or language systems, because it’s regularly updated and reflects language as it exists in the real world right now—and because Reddit’s moderators have screened out significant amounts of toxic content. If you believe that people will start turning to generative AI products for information they once found on Reddit, then it seems like the company is training its replacement.
The economics of an internet dominated by AI is still very much in flux, and Reddit isn’t the only one concerned about how AI companies find their training data. The unauthorized use of data to build AI systems has already led to lawsuits from software developers and a major photo agency. And given how much damage Silicon Valley has done to traditional media business models, content companies are very wary of the tech industry’s intentions. News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson recently complained that “content mining is an extractive industry.” AI companies have begun to have talks with various media companies about how to compensate them for the use of their data. Huffman has said publicly that Reddit is involved in such talks. A Reddit spokesperson said in an email that the company couldn’t share any information “on current or past business discussions,” including the status of its IPO plans, and declined to make Huffman available for an interview.
More recently, the public discussion of Reddit’s API policies has shifted to center more on developers who use its APIs to build applications, including Reddit-reading apps with different features and user interfaces. AI may eventually evolve into an existential threat; because some of these readers run their own advertising, they’re competing with Reddit today. “We’ve been subsidizing other businesses for free for a long time. We’re stopping that. That is not a negotiable point,” Huffman told NPR on June 15. “We simply were in an unsustainable position.”
There are clear echoes here with the dilemma at Twitter. That company’s struggles to find a sustainable business model played a role in its decision to sell to Elon Musk. His interest in paid subscriptions was driven in part by an effort to find an alternative to Twitter’s flailing advertising business (though there are clearly noneconomic factors at play with Musk as well). Like Reddit, Musk has taken an aggressive line on API access. The longer the advertising business stagnates, and the more evidence there is that AI products will displace other activity online, the more tech businesses will be compelled to seek financial sustainability in ways that risk bringing them into conflict with their users.
But Reddit power users are something else, using the site in a way that seems more like employment than leisure, except for the getting-paid part. Moderators continuously monitor its thousands of communities, at times using software built by independent developers who rely on Reddit’s API to build tools it hasn’t made itself. Tools that make the site accessible to, say, blind users have often been made by third parties. “Reddit is a platform that fundamentally relies on volunteer labor,” says J. Nathan Matias, who leads Cornell University’s Citizens & Technology Lab and has studied Reddit moderation.
Huffman has drawn a distinction between independent tools that help keep the site running and those that compete with it. He has said that Reddit will maintain access to the tools moderators need through agreements with developers, or by building them itself. The company’s spokesperson said the “vast majority” of API users, including those who build tools for moderators, won’t have to pay for access. Some long-term moderators are skeptical it can follow through. “Reddit has earned minimal trust here,” says Fraser Raeburn, a teaching associate at the University of Sheffield and a moderator on r/AskHistorians. “These issues go back years and have never been meaningfully addressed.”
Raeburn spends about 10 hours each week moderating his subreddit—he’s one of almost three dozen moderators on the AskHistorians forum, which has 1.9 million subscribers. After going private for two days, the forum is operating in limited fashion. Raeburn doesn’t feel like his core concerns have been addressed, and thinks the company’s combative response to the conflict carries significant risks. “I think Reddit would find out very quickly how much their website is worth if people stop wanting to put their own time and energy into it,” he says.
Reddit is going to need developers to do things like build tools to protect the forums against the waves of AI-generated content that are already starting to flood the site, says Raeburn: “We broadly share Reddit’s concern about this. We don’t love these large language models. We don’t think they’re a good development for either Reddit or the internet.” He adds that he has no problem with Reddit figuring out a way to charge the AI companies directly. “We want Reddit to succeed,” he says. “We even want to see it succeed as a business.”Read next: Layoffs and AI Are Changing Tech’s Once-Invincible Job Market
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