The Complicity of Contribution
The thing that makes a social media site a place to be is that there are other people there. You joined Facebook because some of your friends were on it, and as a result of your presence, Facebook becomes a little more appealing to your other friends, who became more likely to sign up, and so on. Simply by being on a platform you are contributing to its growth. Reddit works on the same principle, but mostly with strangers who share a common interest in a given topic. The more people talking about that topic, the more appealing the site becomes to others, who become more likely to sign up.
Reddit is proud of this diverse variety of niche topics, and uses it in its marketing all the time:
The message is: There’s a subreddit for anything. Whatever hobbies or shows you’re into you can find people talking about it on Reddit. Do you live in a place? Do you have an uncommon sexual fetish? It’s on Reddit. Do you have a loved one who went down the Rabbit hole? Are you a teenager? The concept is simple: come for what you love, stay to find what you don’t even know you’ll love tomorrow!
However the issue with being a place people want to be, is that the more people in a place, the more appealing it will be, not just to friends and like-minded individuals, but to manipulators and bad actors. Pickpockets and grifters go to Times Square because people want to be there; they won’t set up shop in a small town designated “Grifters-and-thievesville” if they don’t have to.
The solution seems simple, right? Put up a sign at the entrances that says “No grifting or thieving” and hire some people to police the area with the understanding that the occasional theft or grift could slip through the cracks, but you can rest assured that it is not welcome.
Reddit’s approach has been, well, not that. Disinformation is rampant on social media, and people are dying as a result. One can probably draw a link between disinformation on Reddit and the deadly Charlottesville protests, or January 6th riots. But the disinformation regarding the Covid-19 pandemic is more direct and easy to understand. One’s “opinion” about the existence of the virus, or efficacy of masks and vaccines is irrelevant to the facts.
Of course, the grifters and thieves would claim they have opinions that can somehow trump facts, and if asked to take their grift elsewhere will claim their right to free speech. They might even take famous speeches out of context to make their point, because well, they’re grifters. They don’t care about the spirit of the rules, only the grift.
Reddit could easily ask the people lying about COVID-19 to leave. They could put up a sign and tell the users “we don’t want grifters” and hire some extra people to enforce it. They have the right. They built the damn thing. But they haven’t done that. Instead- the people who are spreading deadly lies are treated exactly the same as the teenagers, knitters and Trekkies. They are given a home, and tools to spread their message to other communities.
Is someone lying about COVID-19 cures and presenting it as fact based? Is someone disparaging trans people’s right to exist and presenting it as “just asking questions”? Is someone manipulating crime statistics with a racially implied conclusion? Well, they have permission to do so on Reddit. They have permission to organize, cook up bad science into presentable sounding ideas, and link to themselves from elsewhere. Just the same as r/knitting or r/teenagers could if they wanted. But let’s be real: r/knitting probably isn’t doing that. Teenagers, maybe. The “milk crate challenge” had to’ve come from somewhere.
Now believe it or not, I’m not here to tell Steve Huffman how to run his site or what it can allow. He has a right to free speech too, of course, and if he wants to give a platform to white nationalists, knitters and teenagers alike he probably has the right to it. He’s made his feelings clear on what “valuable discussion” means to him. And I don’t expect to change his mind.
The only thing that’s changed the site’s behavior in the past, whether it was removal of subreddits dedicated to (among other things) photos of sexualized children, photos of murdered children, or celebrating the physical assault of women, has been the harsh spotlight of the media and subsequent response of advertisers. But relying on the media alone isn’t a viable long-term solution, especially when the efforts needed to get media attention grows each time, most recently with a grassroots push to blackout half the site spearheaded by frustrated and guilt-ridden moderators in an effort to remove Covid-19 disinformation centers (an effort that only half-succeeded).
However, I’d like to remind you again about why those grifters and thieves are here in the first place. They’re here because the good communities are really, really good!
Volunteer moderators can fashion their subreddits however they want, and many are actually quite adept at keeping out the grifters and thieves. As a result those subreddits (and by extension, Reddit as a whole) become even more attractive to newcomers. Someone coming to Reddit for the first time could be forgiven for assuming it’s a wholly welcoming, tolerant and accepting place, because the way they came into it was. But anyone who’s spent considerable time on the platform knows it’s not any of those things. And the key thing is- it’s not by mistake. The grifters are there, of course, but they didn’t sneak in through the back door or all venture over from another website. They have a home here, just like r/teenagers.
Reddit is a really, really fun place, until it’s not.
The moderators keep their own sections publicly presentable, which attracts users. The users attract advertisers, advertisers attract investors, and so on. Growing the site all the while and therefore collectively growing the reach and influence of individual communities, knitters, melissophiles and COVID deniers alike.
Now as a long time moderator, who took great pride in keeping his community as free of racists, trolls, and bad science as possible, what keeps me up at night, is this question:
How many people came to Reddit through my subreddit, fun and welcoming as it was, only to fall down a rabbit hole of disinformation shortly thereafter? How many people did I mislead about the true nature of this website? How many died as a result?
So now we’ve arrived at the ethical dilemma presented to every user, but especially to every moderator: Do I carry on as usual? Banning the transphobes, reporting harassers, correcting COVID-19 deniers? Do I make my modest corner, and by extension reddit.com, more appealing to newcomers?
Maybe I stop the moderating altogether, keeping the community up and letting the trolls and grifters in and hoping (dreading?) it gets unbearable to the point that Reddit might becomes a little less appealing overall?
Or- do I shut it down, destroying the wonderful, wonderful community I helped build from nothing, but resting easy that I won’t be a cog in Mr Huffman’s radicalization/polarization/disinformation machine?
It’s a Sophie’s choice. There’s no logical solution I can arrive at except possibly the hopeless effort of asking both Mr Huffman and the staff of Reddit to reconsider the souls hurt while lining pockets, and to ask Reddit’s many users to reconsider how badly you really need to talk about Star Trek in this particular place of all places.
There’s an old internet adage that, while not universally and literally true, is often true in spirit. It goes: “If you aren’t paying for it, you are the product.” In short: Your participation is a contribution.
And contribution is complicity.
