Points of Discussion
- Why is Reddit voluntarily sending their own website off a cliff by essentially eliminating foundational third-party apps — crippling user experience in the process?
- Why does Reddit have such inconsistent moderation and administration?
- Why are Reddit admins upholding objectively racist comments?
In truth, I endeavored on my first video publication with this write-up being my script, but I wound up pulling my hair out between learning the ins-and-outs of video production and not quite meeting the standard of quality I demanded of myself. Combine that with having our newborn, and well, corners needed to be cut.
Now if you would, please walk with me for a moment…
I’m not the oldest of Reddit members, but I’ve been a part of this community for over 10 years with over half a million comment karma and money made for Reddit through both gildings and content provided of my own. Over the years I’ve reported incivility, harassment, racist, sexist, and violent comments to make Reddit a better place.
I’ve generally tried to maintain a level of substance in my comments with more informative and sourced write-ups garnering a tiny following of around 200 users, receiving many BestOf’d comments while also raising major concerns regarding the presence of right-wing extremists and foreign (primarily Russian) operatives to Reddit directly, resulting in a highly gilded (and also brigaded) comment on RedditSecurity. I’ve tried to make Reddit a better place by fostering new communities to help process grief and tragedy, like r/LiveForThem, or r/cgtcivics — A Citizen’s Guide to Civics — to help foster civic and political engagement.
The point is — I have a fairly good pulse on how Reddit and its communities function. Now I wouldn’t consider myself a power-user by any means, but there are countless little cogwheels in this community like myself that help move the content along.
So given the commotion over major changes to Reddit lately — namely to Reddit API — I just wanted to go over my personal experiences in witnessing the current decline of reddit moderation, administration, and the overall vision of the site as seen by the late co-founder, Aaron Swartz. Something I haven’t seen discussed too much and something I wish to amplify.
(For those who wish to know more about him, there’s a great documentary titled, “The Internet’s Own Boy.” But in short he was the heart and soul of Reddit and its original vision, believing both in open discourse and free access to publicly-funded academic research.)
Now before we go further let’s quickly just pause for a second and remember another website — Digg. Before Reddit there was Digg, and I loved Digg. But Digg rapidly collapsed after as one MBA analysis put it, “A complete site revamp in 2010 alienated users who were not consulted before many popular features were removed.” Foreboding words that the Reddit team should be mindful of when considering the fragility of their own creation.
So what are the Reddit API changes?
In short, Reddit will be charging a significant fee per each access to their content when it was previously freely accessible to developers of third-party software. Not just a small fee either — a massive fee disproportionate to industry standard.
(See Reddit’s initial announcement regarding this)
So what’s the big deal about the Reddit API changes?
Well, there are direct statements from:
— Reddit Enhancement Suites
— Push Shift / Camas search tool
— Apollo phone app
— Reddit Is Fun phone app
… All with millions of users among many others forewarning the imminent risk or guaranteed shut-down of their applications following the Reddit changes. This impacts moderators, users, and third-party developers massively.
These all provide massive enhancements to Reddit’s content, be it better access to finding specific content, reviewing one’s own deep comment history, or providing a better browsing experience. Stuff that Core Reddit takes advantage of in an otherwise symbiotic relationship with 3rd-party developers — and if they had to develop themselves, would be vastly more expensive for Reddit to develop than to provide mere query calls to their databases.
Key pillars to the community, completely undermined by the very roof they prop up.
Along with these third-party apps, many large subreddits among thousands of others have protested this sleight to their communities by going dark on June 12 for a period of at least 48-hours with many going longer or indefinitely. Keep in mind that by the current pricing model that Reddit has advertised, these largely free or donation-based apps would require quite literally millions of dollars to run — an impossibility.
Moreover there has already been speculation that this streamlining process of Reddit won’t stop there and that the next thing on the chopping-block might be reddit.old, which retains — last reported by Reddit — 33% of the userbase’s primary desktop browsing experience. This comparable to the protest of Facebook’s elimination of their original, simplistic UI. Unfortunately what is sleek and effective for the end-user isn’t also conducive to corporate profits.
Thus as Reddit pushes for an IPO so shareholders can inevitably cash out, the users invariably suffer.
So is it possible the burden was too heavy for Reddit?
Are things looking that dark for Reddit that they feel compelled to make such changes despite an obvious decline in support and user-base following these changes? If that’s the case, it might be wise for them to be more transparent and to see how the community as a whole could help sustain Reddit. As opposed to front-loading this burden onto third-party developers who help prop up the entire Reddit platform.
Of course, Reddit’s CEO himself said that Reddit is not profitable as it stands — hence his scrambling to stop the devaluation of Reddit ahead of their public offering while cutting expenditures where he can… But perhaps this begs the more pertinent question: Could a non-profit open-source fulfill Aaron Swartz’ vision better? That is, whether it’s Reddit or something else that supersedes it, could such a website exist in a better state under something similar to say, the Wikimedia Foundation?
Food for thought, but I believe it could.
The reality is, what Reddit fostered is a complex ecosystem. But the greenhouse that created this ecosystem is no longer innovative; in fact it could quite easily be replicated — and already has to some extent with various spin-offs out there. User migration is the only key, and — and I’ll repeat this fact to drive it home — both Digg and MySpace know that’s perfectly plausible. So the sooner Reddit recognizes the symbiosis — the cyclical nature of platform and community content generation — the sooner they can restore order.
Part 2: An Anecdote
Now, something a bit more personal but related to the broader topic at hand. Recently, my accounts were permanently suspended for “ban evasion.” This requires some context to see the nuance, so please bear with me as this circles back to the primary topic at hand.
Originally, the r/news subreddit — a default sub mind you that generally has to uphold a greater sense of standards and consistency — banned me. The thing is, it was without any explanation whatsoever. I can only guess the comment that got me banned, which was a heated discussion— but in my view no way overboard. In any case, no link to the comment that violated their rules, no pointing to any specific rule, and zero dialogue despite my repeated respectful inquiries drawn out over weeks. This isn’t a unique trend from them in my experience, and from what I’ve gleaned from other long-time users — it seems the r/news subreddit has a reputation for not just having low transparency, but being completely opaque in their arbitrary and inconsistently-applied content moderation and rules:
- All their moderators are hidden. Given a known and concerted effort by Russian and Right-wing operatives to take over these subs to control their narrative, I find this deeply unsettling.
- They rarely if ever give an explanation of why a submission was removed or the comments locked, why you were banned, and so forth.
- For recent years it’s come to the point that events in the news that cast any controversy whatsoever along political fault-lines tended to get locked down rapidly; top comments deleted without merit, etc. Now there are two ways to look at this last behavior: 1) Either they’re sympathetic to right-wing extremist views, or 2) They cave to the right-wing extremist tactics that entail making a scene until mods get fed-up and shut down all fruitful discussion — essentially, laziness in moderation and an injustice to open productive discourse that caves to the worst among us.
A fairly gross level of incompetence for a default subreddit fielding millions of users. And if this was par for the course across all subs, I wouldn’t expect any different. But other multi-million-user subs tend to perform a far more consistent, restrained, and mature moderation of their subs. (Will get to those). The only two options that present are either laziness or ideological motive.
And here’s the thing — Reddit continuously blurs the line between keeping moderators at a distance with no say, but also claiming they rely on them at every turn. So, which is it? They aren’t “Landed gentry,” as Steve Huffman said in a recent interview, they’re closer to a Landlord’s Serfs — conveniently exploited as cheap labor doing the dirty work and cast aside when expedient.
So months pass and I began posting on r/news under my alternate account, generally used to separate regional stuff. I made many comments with no warning. Then suddenly, I’m banned again. No warning, nothing at all. Now admittedly there was some level of stubbornness and protest in my move after getting zero response from moderators or admins for recent issues. But I figured for something like ban evasion to be considered by Admins, there required two key contingencies (1) A clear, core violation of Reddit’s community rules — such as engaging in outright harassment, violence, racism, gross incivility, etc. and/or (2) An attempt at concealment. After all, let’s use common sense here: Reddit clearly knew that my accounts were linked from the start — so then why doesn’t Reddit automatically ban all linked accounts for that subreddit? That seems to be a more leveled response that sets more clear rules & expectations. This otherwise teeters on senseless entrapment and a gross ambiguity of the rules.
To be clear my ban evasion was:
- Not repeatedly violating the same rule on the sub or a Reddit comment standards policy. I can see how someone making racist comments on a sub then immediately making a new account and repeating the same behavior would be summarily, justifiably banned. That was not the case here, and neither do I feel that there was justification in a permanent ban of the last batch of comments I had made on r/news. Heated, sure. Over the line? No. But I guess I knew I was playing with fire and to my own fault I should’ve realized that moderator teams often do see nuance. At most I expected the comment thread to be nuked or my comment removed for incivility — something that likely would have occurred on other multi-million user subreddits.
- Utterly unhidden. That is, I made no attempt to mask my browser cookies, hide my IP, hide my MAC address, avoid the phone app trackers or anything like that. This is the extent to which I didn’t even think it was an issue, really. As a software engineer I’m fully aware of what I needed to consider, if I thought this was actually an issue in the first place.
There was no warning. Just straight to full ban. Which by the way, doesn’t really address the core problem for Reddit of those more nefarious than myself in seeking a ban-evasion — it’s quite easy to circumvent, unfortunately.
Finally, Reddit justified the permanent ban based on a previous 3-day-suspension strike against my account that was a complete exploit, error, or misunderstanding. If anyone can explain to me how providing scientific evidence of an interesting non-controversial tidbit on how the immune system works is targeted harassment warranting a 3-day suspension… Let me know (see image below).
Oh, I appealed this several times, contacted Reddit via modmail and received absolutely NO response. Yet again, it was cited as justification for my now permanent suspension:
That doesn’t seem right to me.
… Unfortunately, Reddit does not do well with contextual nuance. After all, the Reddit appeal form limits your appeal to… 250 characters, hearkening to some kangaroo court.
Now I know moderation is a thankless job that many perform very admirably; but the flip-side of that is that it also has a tendency to attract the exact kind of people who shouldn’t have power in the first place but are drawn to it just the same — and every self-moderated website in existence has fallen to this problem, while paid Reddit Admins themselves are stretched thin. This exacerbated by the reported laying off of a chunk of their staff. I can give examples of mods I agree with, even having been on the receiving end of their ban-hammers. r/Politics and r/WorldNews subs tend to have great moderators who communicate clearly and transparently while also practicing restraint in their judgements. I’ve fairly received a couple temporary bans from politics for instance for incivility at times — I have a tendency to push the bully back more than they like and that’s backfired on me — but in most cases I agreed with their verdict and accept the fine with introspection that I crossed the line at times. I apologize pretty regularly in threads just the same when I realize I became too heated or misunderstood (And I’d show you more examples of that, but PushShift comment searching no longer works, thanks to the Reddit API changes).
… And you know, my final thought is that I wouldn’t care so much about having been banned IF the consistency was there. Without upholding the spirit of the rule, without looking at the broader context, and without dolling out justice both equitably and proportionally — there arises long-term problems for such a community. I think about just how much slack controversial subs like r/The_Donald got away with before Reddit was compelled by overwhelmingly bad press to finally pull the plug. So I have no problem getting my wrist slapped — so long as the slap fits the crime, and so long as those violating worse rules are held to a proportionate standard.
I think about the fact that there are users who report engaging in vote manipulation — a far greater offense in my view — and yet only received 3-day temporary bans. Even famous Unidan who engaged in vote-manipulation was allowed to make a new account without it being automatically banned as is otherwise standard practice. Furthermore I think about subreddits whose sole purpose is a launching-point for viciously brigading other comment threads — and yet Reddit again turns a blind eye. And this is the problem with Reddit. They go after the little guy and low-hanging fruit, but neglect to tackle the broader challenges with greater implications. A tail as old as time.
The point is, Reddit is far from consistent. Case-in-point, Reddit is upholding blatantly racist comments:
When reported to Reddit, I received an auto-response that it was already reviewed and saw nothing wrong:
Thanks for submitting a report to the Reddit admin team. This content has already been investigated from a previous report. After investigating, we’ve found that the reported content doesn’t violate Reddit’s Content Policy.
… Then later, inquiring again via ModMail:
Hi and thanks for reporting this to us. We have reviewed the content that you have submitted, and it does not appear to break the site rules at this time.
I’m not sure if Reddit is confused on whether hate speech and racism can occur if the person simply claims they’re also of that race or ethnicity, but that of course would open a massive loophole for bigots to exploit. I read through their terms of use and it seems quite clear and to make no exception for this.
Keep in mind that in 2020, Reddit claimed to be cracking down on this sort of thing, but there are clearly glaring holes in their active moderation system, which I’ve read increasingly relies on automation and bots. Not good.
This is all but a single anecdote — not from landed gentry — but from a lowly pawn. But I think it reflects what many users would agree is broadly repeating itself across an otherwise positively-contributing user-base that holds this website together. The user-base that is the heart-and-soul of Reddit deserves more competency.
Conclusion
Now I’ve loved Reddit just as I loved Digg before it. In the right hands it can be used as a source for good. Staying informed, learning new stuff, promoting progressive social movements, challenging one’s own ideas, biases and so forth….
… But if you combine the content moderation inconsistencies with the fact that Reddit in one stroke is effectively eliminating major third-party apps that greatly enhance the Reddit user-experience, it becomes the nail in the coffin for both me and many, many others who already have existing grievances. Reddit REALLY needs to turn this ship around on a variety of levels, lest they meet the same fate of Digg. At best it then continues to run the risk of becoming what Twitter has recently accelerated into: Another Voat or 4chan — inundated with far-right extremists, trolls, and bots.
So why am I writing this? One part justice, and one part saying my piece amidst all the rest of the protests of Reddit. The thing is, if I didn’t care, I wouldn’t write this. What makes Reddit great isn’t simply the elegant simplicity of their aggregator, but the structure of their comment boards that — more so than quite literally any other medium on the internet — seems to foster… Kind of… Sort-of good dialogue. And Reddit is jeopardizing all of that. So I’m just one more canary among thousands in the coalmine, sounding the alarm of what will inevitably come.
… But do the executives care? Based on the CEO’s recent AMA, followed by his NBC interview praising Elon Musk’s disastrous work at Twitter— the answer is a resounding No. At this moment Steve Huffman seems overwhelmingly disliked by the community, and now clearly holds personal resentment for it. At this point he has only a formal obligation to his job in a business sense to remain tepidly civil — and so is abandoning this ship with the largest chunk of money he can get — all the while sinking it in the process. Thus radical change in administration is unlikely to occur unless an equally-radical change in leadership occurs.
If you read some of the topic comment chains in these protests, you see a lot of users almost excited to break their own addiction of Reddit. Reddit made that decision for me by force, but many are about to voluntarily do so if Reddit doesn’t change course… And fast. Reddit will Digg its own grave while something replaces it no differently than how Facebook replaced MySpace… Or Reddit with Digg.
Whether something replaces Reddit will be determined by whether (a) Reddit proceeds on the course its own, and (b) whether there is another platform capable of seizing the opportunity as Reddit did with Digg. I’m not sure if there is, which is why I hope Reddit succeeds in overturning these disastrous executive decisions as of late… Yet I simultaneously fear that because there isn’t a strong alternative waiting in the wings that such a platform needs created sooner than later. Ultimately I believe Aaron Swartz would be sorely disappointed with the direction Huffman is taking Reddit. I think it therefore bears repeating the question: Why can’t Reddit be non-profit, or open-source? After all in this day it remains nearly as vital as Wikipedia itself to staying informed.
Consider reaching out to Reddit, to press — and inquiring:
- Why are Reddit admins upholding objectively racist comments?
- Why does Reddit have such inconsistent moderation and administration?
- Why is Reddit voluntarily sending their own website off a cliff by essentially eliminating foundational third-party apps — crippling user experience in the process?
… And remember, for many protesters, the protest may never cease to end. They might find they’re more productive. Happier, even.
That can’t bode well for Reddit’s valuation.
Thanks for reading my shitty monologue, and if this resonated with you at all, please consider sharing forward.