ON Reddit, IT IS QUITE EASY TO IRRITATE PEOPLE. Less likely to anger essentially everyone on the platform.
Despite objections over its decision to charge for access to its API, Reddit’s management has been able to accomplish this objective. This ruling threatens to plunge the company into a death spiral as users revolt, the most devoted community administrators leave, and lively discussions migrate to other platforms.
Changes to the company’s data access policies have effectively priced out third-party developers who create mobile applications for browsing Reddit; two of the most popular options, Reddit Is Fun and Apollo, which have over 41 million downloads combined, are closing. After initial backlash from users and disability advocates who said Reddit’s changes would negatively impact accessibility-focused apps for people with dyslexia or visual impairments, Reddit announced that it would exempt these apps from the price increases. These applications have significantly fewer users than Apollo or RIF.
“The balloon cannot be inflated eternally. It will eventually explode.”
RORY MIR OF THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION
Reddit’s plans, which were motivated by a desire to make the company more profitable as it approaches an initial public offering, prompted a protest across nearly 9,000 subreddits, whose moderators switched their communities to private mode, preventing anyone from accessing them. Four days later, many of these subreddits remain inaccessible, and their moderators say they intend to maintain the suspension indefinitely.
Regardless of how unfazed Reddit executives appear, this subreddit seppuku appears to be a sure-fire means to sink the company. But does this truly portend the end of Reddit?
Rory Mir, an associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, states, “I cannot see it any other way.” (Earlier this week, Mir wrote about the errors made by Reddit.) Similar to Twitter, when a social media website begins to die, it is not a sudden collapse, but rather a slow attrition unless they alter their strategy. The longer they remain in their current position, the more users and content they will lose.”
Reddit’s unrest is the most recent in a series of social media upheavals that appear to pit profit-driven companies against their users. Platforms such as Reddit, Twitter, and even Amazon, which initially operated at a loss in order to expand their user base, eventually encounter pressures to monetize their traffic further. Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe the decline and possible demise of a platform that occurs when a website prioritizes profit over the desires and requirements of its users.
“Any plan that involves endless and continuous growth is bound to encounter scale issues,” Mir says. “This is where I believe Reddit and Twitter are experiencing issues.” “The balloon cannot be inflated eternally. It will eventually explode.”
Amy Bruckman is a regents’ professor and senior associate chair at the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has also contributed to WIRED and is a moderator for a number of subreddits, including the extremely popular r/science, which is locked until Monday. According to Bruckman, this era of social media has been marked by numerous abrupt changes. “There was a lengthy period of time, perhaps a decade, when it seemed like things would always be this way,” she explains. “Everything has abruptly changed.”
Reddit charging for API access is about more than just third-party applications, according to Bruckman. This has infuriated so many Redditors because it feels like a betrayal of the community’s trust. It may be a vocal minority of users who are upset about the changes, but these are the individuals who volunteer their time to maintain communities functional, and they are arguably the most important users on the site.
“Beyond the fact that our work is more difficult in a dozen ways, Reddit felt more like an open platform where innovation by dedicated users was encouraged,” says Bruckman. And this appears to be infringing on that.
Reddit has denied that it is targeting third-party applications such as Apollo and RIF. The company’s initial explanation for limiting API access was that it wanted to control the flow of data consumed by companies training large language models using generative artificial intelligence, such as OpenAI. Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, stated in an interview with NPR that limiting third-party access will also help Reddit maintain control over how it displays advertisements to users, the company’s primary source of revenue. If you force everyone to use a single app, it will be simpler to fill their feeds with advertising.
“They’re shooting themselves in the foot,” explains Mir. “The user-generated content is what makes the platform worthwhile to visit. These hosts erroneously believe that their hosting is the reason people visit their site, when in fact it is the other users on the medium who attract visitors.
Moreover, these consumers are leaving. Bruckman states that she is acquainted with a moderator who has already resigned, stating that it was not worth the effort to devote so much time to a company that can simply disregard that effort. Similar to Twitter, there is no obvious alternative that has emerged. Bruckman advocates for the public financing of a nonprofit Reddit-like platform. Some casual users report returning to Tumblr in 2018, which is still recuperating from its own corporate cleansing.
Still, according to Mir, there is a genuine demand for platform stability. It is one reason why sites like Reddit and Twitter have become so popular. There are individuals who have maintained the same email address for thirty years or the same Reddit username for a decade. If users have invested a significant amount of time in a community, it will be difficult to find an alternative among the multitude of federated upstarts claiming to be the next best thing.
Obviously, Reddit hopes that inertia and customer loyalty will keep users on its website. Even if users complain about losing their preferred app, the company anticipates that they will eventually acquire the official app. That may work on the average user, but it will be more difficult to convert mods, particularly those who have been burned by Reddit’s financial schemes.
Mir offers a second business analogy for the tension on Reddit: “If you own a great music venue but sever ties with every notable artist, your venue will not be very successful. You must prioritize the requirements of the individuals providing value on your platform.”
