[Global] Reddit owners vs moderators battle takes unusual turn

An ongoing battle between Reddit’s owners and its army of volunteer moderators has taken an unusual turn. A number of the biggest “subreddits” on the site have suddenly been dedicated to sharing pictures of British comic and late-night host John Oliver, The Guardian reports.

Reddit’s owners intend to take the company public and must boost revenue from the social news site before they do. In addition to advertising, the site has generated funds from its Reddit Gold subscription service. It sells users the ability to send each other the status, together with badges and icons, as rewards for creating quality posts.

Reddit has reportedly experimented with alternative revenue sources, in recent months, such as selling NFTs. Its most recent change has proved even more controversial; a decision to introduce a significant charge for users of its API; the system that allows other software and apps to connect to Reddit.

Objections

The API has many users and some of these - such as large data-scraping firms - are now direct targets of change. Reddit says it wants these companies which use Reddit data to train systems such as ChatGPT, to pay for the privilege. Yet in the process, it has also blocked others, including popular apps that ordinary users rely on to browse the site.

The greatest controversy has been among the volunteer moderators of the site. These unpaid users reportedly perform the majority of the labour required to make the site operate on a day-to-day basis; deleting spam, enforcing rules and shepherding subreddit users.

Moderators subsequently announced a strike. More than 80 per cent of the site’s user-created active subreddits locked themselves to new users and many of these blocked all new posts, initially for a two-day protest. When Reddit’s owners continued to stand their ground, the protests were extended. They are now in their second week.

The John Oliver twist

Reddit’s owners started fighting the strike by removing moderators, claiming that by closing their subreddits they had become “inactive” and needed to be replaced with “active” moderators. Mods who coincidentally support ending the strike.

Some of the biggest subreddit moderators, therefore, came up with a new plan. Instead of going silent, they determined to actively enforce their subreddit’s rules and to introduce some new - particularly strict - rules and put these rules to a vote to forestall accusations of forcing users to support a protest against their will.

“Aww” - the cute-theme-focused subreddit - for example, held a vote on June 17 to impose a new rule that would “only allow adorable content featuring John Oliver, Chiijohn, and anything else that closely resembles them”. 

The John Oliver rule was adopted with 50,000 votes in support, and 3,000 votes against. The more than 34 million subscribers - and their very active moderators - reportedly intend to continue to protest against the new charges indefinitely.

John Oliver has tweeted to express his support for the strike.

Source: The Guardian

(Links via original reporting)

An ongoing battle between Reddit’s owners and its army of volunteer moderators has taken an unusual turn. A number of the biggest “subreddits” on the site have suddenly been dedicated to sharing pictures of British comic and late-night host John Oliver, The Guardian reports.

Reddit’s owners intend to take the company public and must boost revenue from the social news site before they do. In addition to advertising, the site has generated funds from its Reddit Gold subscription service. It sells users the ability to send each other the status, together with badges and icons, as rewards for creating quality posts.

Reddit has reportedly experimented with alternative revenue sources, in recent months, such as selling NFTs. Its most recent change has proved even more controversial; a decision to introduce a significant charge for users of its API; the system that allows other software and apps to connect to Reddit.

Objections

The API has many users and some of these - such as large data-scraping firms - are now direct targets of change. Reddit says it wants these companies which use Reddit data to train systems such as ChatGPT, to pay for the privilege. Yet in the process, it has also blocked others, including popular apps that ordinary users rely on to browse the site.

The greatest controversy has been among the volunteer moderators of the site. These unpaid users reportedly perform the majority of the labour required to make the site operate on a day-to-day basis; deleting spam, enforcing rules and shepherding subreddit users.

Moderators subsequently announced a strike. More than 80 per cent of the site’s user-created active subreddits locked themselves to new users and many of these blocked all new posts, initially for a two-day protest. When Reddit’s owners continued to stand their ground, the protests were extended. They are now in their second week.

The John Oliver twist

Reddit’s owners started fighting the strike by removing moderators, claiming that by closing their subreddits they had become “inactive” and needed to be replaced with “active” moderators. Mods who coincidentally support ending the strike.

Some of the biggest subreddit moderators, therefore, came up with a new plan. Instead of going silent, they determined to actively enforce their subreddit’s rules and to introduce some new - particularly strict - rules and put these rules to a vote to forestall accusations of forcing users to support a protest against their will.

“Aww” - the cute-theme-focused subreddit - for example, held a vote on June 17 to impose a new rule that would “only allow adorable content featuring John Oliver, Chiijohn, and anything else that closely resembles them”. 

The John Oliver rule was adopted with 50,000 votes in support, and 3,000 votes against. The more than 34 million subscribers - and their very active moderators - reportedly intend to continue to protest against the new charges indefinitely.

John Oliver has tweeted to express his support for the strike.

Source: The Guardian

(Links via original reporting)