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- Reddit Is The Center of Everything This Week
Reddit Is The Center of Everything This Week
Plus the word “enshittification” is fun
What’s Going On With the Reddit API
The changes Reddit is making to their API for third-party apps and the Reddit user community’s response to those changes feel like a nexus event around which so many of the tech, politics, and cultural trends that interest me are rotating. Before I pull out the red string and start connecting ideas, I thought it would be good to go over what’s actually happened so far with this story. So let's begin with a timeline of major events.
April 18, 2023 - Reddit announced they’d be updating the terms of use for Reddit’s Data API. The API is what allows third-party developers to build tools and apps that interact with Reddit. With Reddit, third-party tools are often the better (or sometimes the only) option for moderating complex communities or providing critical accessibility features for users with disabilities. At this time, Reddit did not include any details about pricing changes for API access. They also stressed that “These updates should not impact moderation bots and extensions we know our moderators and communities rely on.”
June 2, 2023 - Reddit dropped the details on the pricing changes. And um, they are not minor adjustments. This is where things start to fall apart. The pricing changes effectively make it impossible for many third-party apps and tools to operate. For example, Apollo, a popular Reddit app (which I assumed was already owned and maintained by Reddit itself because it’s basically the default app for actually using Reddit on mobile), calculated that it would cost around $20 million per year to cover the API access costs.
June 8, 2023 - Apollo announced it would be shutting down due to these changes. This was also the day that Reddit announced they’d make an exception for some third-party tools that offer accessibility features. As all of the back and forth between the company, power users, and the developer community played out, you got the sense that this change wasn’t fully thought through.
June 12, 2023 - Several subreddits, including many of the site's largest communities, went dark in protest. Basically, the mods set their forums to private, preventing anyone from accessing them. The initial plan was for this to be a 48-hour action, but some have continued to stay dark. The scale of this protest is pretty massive. Reddit itself briefly crashed on the 12th as communities went private in mass. People noted that the quality of Google searches decreased since Reddit is often one of the best sources to answer many search queries.
I skipped over a lot of details here to just hit the critical high points, so if you want to dive deeper into this story, I recommend checking out The Verge’s coverage.
Platform Updates
The Rest of Meta
TikTok
YouTube
Pinterest (disclosure: I currently work as a contractor with Pinterest)
Twitch
The Product
Twitter Tests New Restrictions on DMs to Combat Message Spam (now only the apps spammiest users will be able to send DM spam)
The Dumpster Fire
Culture Movers
Film & TV
Gaming
AI
Enshittification
enshittification (noun) - “When an online platform becomes more monetized and less user-oriented, the longer it lasts. The term was theorized by Canadian writer and thinker Cory Doctorow to describe the trajectory of platforms like TikTok, Amazon, and Twitter.” (source)
I’m somewhat sympathetic to Reddit’s predicament here. Maintaining the core platform and API costs them money. They are trying to go public soon, and charging more for API access makes sense as a way to improve profitability. Reddit’s third-party tools are beloved and, in some cases, essential for many, including their most active power users. There’s a world where Reddit could have worked with the third-party developer community to make these pricing changes over time, acquiring third-party tools to integrate into the core product, and catering the pricing plan to incentivize innovation. Instead, we got a rapid and expensive change that’s, either by design or negligence, going to choke out the third-party ecosystem and make Reddit less useful.
It’s Twitter Blue. Ruin the experience for the majority of users in the hopes that enough will pay up. It’s the zero-interest rate world of easy investment fund money returning to haunt tech. It’s next-quarter metrics thinking stomping out long-term product vision. It’s enshittification.
Tech’s Crisis of Leadership
I didn’t mention Reddit’s CEO, Steve Huffman, in my timeline, but he’s an important player in understanding this story. He’s one of the site’s co-founders and comes across as the villain of this API story to a lot of folks. Back on June 9th, in a classic comms mistake, Huffman hosted a Reddit AMA to address questions and concerns from the community. I’ve been in the room with tech CEOs trying to do crisis comms via Reddit AMA. It’s not fun. The surprise here was how he goes after Apollo developer Christian Selig got. Huffman comes across as bitter and defensive, which is only going to error trust with other developers and power users.
I’ve worked in tech for about a decade now. I don’t see a lot of people I can look up to as role models in leadership roles at very many of these companies. There certainly are great people working in this industry and leading some of these companies, don’t get me wrong. It’s just not nearly as many as I’d hope for. There’s the cruelty to how many handled layoffs in the past few years. Illogical return-to-office plans have workers going in just to take Zoom calls from within a building the company leases. The unquestioning willingness to build scammy crypto and NFT features into their products. The bizarre sense of paranoia, like when Huffman warned Reddit employees to avoid wearing company merch in public this week due to community protests.
Elon is obviously an emperor with no clothes, but when you hang around tech workers long enough, you get a sense that many of them see the industry's c-suite as half-dressed at best. Before we move on, I want to be clear that this section should not be read as a direct comment on any current or former employers of mine. You can pick up on this vibe just by talking to people who work in this industry.
Worker’s Rights
Community management and moderation is tough work. I’ve done a lot of it in my career. It’s labor. Reddit is successful because people volunteer that labor to them. The moderators of each individual Subreddit community get to set and enforce their own rules.
This flexible and varied set of rules is a big part of what makes Reddit successful. You can create a safe space for detailed and nuanced conversation by strictly enforcing rules against trolling or overly negative comments. You can keep a forum laser-focused on a technical topic allowing useful advice and troubleshooting to surface by banning off-topic discussion. You can run an asynchronous fandom by getting aggressive about tagging spoilers. Enforcing all of that is hard work, even with great third-party moderation tools, and Reddit doesn’t pay mods to do it. Those mods have a lot of power because their labor has a lot of power.
On a technical level, they can take their communities private to degrade the quality of the site. On a social level, they are well respected by their communities and have a lot of influence on the tone of the conversation around changes to Reddit. On a practical level, if they walk away, many of the site’s most popular forms would stop functioning.
The other big labor-organizing story right now is happening in the film and tv industry. This month SAG-AFTRA members voted to authorize a strike if negotiations with the studios do not meet their goals. It’s very likely that two of the largest entertainment industry unions will be on the picket line together next month. But it’s not just writers and actors; union activity and organizing are on the rise across the country. When faced with income inequality, the rising cost of living, and the enshittification of many of the platforms we’ve come to rely on, I suspect more communities of paid and volunteer labor will start organizing to leverage their collective power.
AI Acceleration
The background hum of a possible booming labor movement might be hard to hear over the megaphone of press around AI. The utility of technology itself, when paired with the powerful marketing hype machine of silicon valley, is forcing AI, or the possibility of AI, into every corner of our lives right now. And guess what? It’s part of the Reddit API saga too. One of the primary reasons Reddit has stated for needing to make these pricing changes is to protect and monetize their mountain of data as a training tool for large language models. Volunteer modes have tended to decades of user-generated data, and Reddit wants to make sure an AI company doesn’t just scoop it all up on the cheap. So this change needed to be made now. The price needed to be high now. AI casts a shadow of acceleration on many changes simmering in the background of tech and culture’s intersection points.
You see the acceleration in platform enshittification. LLMs have a tendency to “hallucinate” information when they can’t answer a question. They aren’t just wrong sometimes; they present accurate and inaccurate information with the same level of confidence. I’d prefer companies work on fixing that tendency before rolling it out as a replacement for search, but now that some AI tools are in the market, everyone needs to put their cards on the table too. Can’t be left behind, even if that means launching riskier or lower quality products.
All those questions about balancing first-to-market advance vs quality product development cut right to the heart of tech’s anxiety about the industry's leadership. Is this just another fad like NFTs? Are people moving too fast? Are the right safety features in place? Can we trust these executives to make the right calls? AI’s forcing all of these questions to the surface.
The use of AI in the writing process is one of the major sticking points in the negotiations between the WGA and the studios. I suspect we’ll see the use of AI show up in many more union agreements and strike demands over the next few years. Workers across multiple industries will want a say in how AI is introduced as a tool and to fight against its use as a replacement for human labor.
This month’s Reddit drama is right in the middle of all this stuff, and I suspect these themes will keep coming up over the next year as tech companies and platforms change.