The Luddite

Reddit has announced outrageous price increases for third-party app developers, and major subreddits are going dark in protest. For those of you who aren't familiar with Reddit, I will further explain what is happening, but I want to say this at the very top: The Luddite fully supports the blackout, and it is not enough. Reddit moderators are "volunteers," i.e. unpaid laborers. Reddit, a for-profit company seeking to IPO, cannot exist without them, yet not only are they unpaid, but Reddit will make arbitrary changes to its site without consulting them, threatening their ability to moderate the communities that they have fostered, from which Reddit profits and they do not.

Social media sites exist because we make the content for them. There is value in social media (I mean that in the non-monetary sense), but the value does not come from Reddit itself; it comes from the moderators of places as diverse as /r/MechanicAdvice, /r/AskHistorians, and /r/SuicideWatch, who put in real and skilled labor into making communities that help real people in their real lives, and from which Reddit profits. People turn to /r/MechanicAdvice when their cars won't start and they need to get to work, and real, actual mechanics help them; AskHistorians has dozens of actual professors moderating to ensure quality, academically rigorous responses to questions from the general public; people turn to /r/SuicideWatch in their darkest hour, and real human beings, under the watchful eyes of the moderators, volunteer to talk to them, during which Reddit runs ads. No one gets paid for any of these interactions, except Reddit.

Now, for the uninitiated, Reddit is a social media website organized around "subreddits." Anyone can create a subreddit, and each subreddit is its own little community, with its own URL, which looks like "reddit.com/r/<name of sub goes here>," (hence the names of subs being preceded with the "/r/"). Reddit users ("redditors") subscribe to subreddits, and when they go to reddit.com, they are presented with posts from the various subreddits to which they have subscribed.

These subreddits require moderation. Anyone can create a subreddit, and the creator becomes its moderator, who then can deputize other redditors to also moderate it. Anyone who has been on social media intuitively understands that in order for a forum to be productive, it must be moderated, and moderating the forum can be a lot of work. Many of the large subreddit moderation teams can be highly sophisticated operations. They require several people to work together, often drafting rules to guide their moderation and give it transparency, sometimes even deploying custom-written moderation software, also created entirely by highly-skilled and totally unpaid volunteers. Some of these third-party moderation tools are themselves quite sophisticated, including tools that detect bots and allow (volunteer) moderators to customize how bots are allowed to interact with their communities.

These bots are also written entirely by the community, and are very diverse. TheBenShapiroBot, which I made, exists to dunk on Ben Shapiro, the self-styled conservative intellectual known for his continued public interest in children's genitals, despite his humiliating and dubious understanding of those of adults (among many other hateful yet no less stupid things). There are all kinds of other bots, like one that can detect when a comment happens to have the requisite syllables for a haiku, then automatically responds with the comment in haiku format; one that responds to let you know if all the letters in your comment happen to be in alphabetical order; there is even a bot that allow users to vote on which bots they like and dislike, keeping a scoreboard. My personal favorite is the GifReversingBot, which you can summon on any post that is a gif (a short video without audio), and it will reply with a reversed version of that same gif.

That brings us to the third-party apps and the current controversy. Reddit, like every other online platform, has made a mobile app, and broken their mobile website on purpose so that you are forced to use the app to access reddit from your phone. They have purposefully disabled features on their mobile site, including moderator tools, for no reason other than to get you to download the app. They have done so for the same reason as everybody else — apps allow for more lucrative advertising and tracking. This perverse incentive scheme has so shaped the modern web that users are now trained to prefer apps when websites are generally both a better experience for the user and easier to make for the company, since they come with all the browser behavior (in-page text search, AdBlockers, bookmarks, navigation buttons, the ability to share links, etc.) and provide one single universal platform, instead of three (website, iOS, Android), two of which require approval by byzantine and arbitrary review processes.

The problem with this, setting aside the obvious problem that the app need not exist in the first place, is that Reddit is actually notoriously bad at making things. In the 2010s, Reddit spent several years redesigning the site. The "redesign" was a disaster. They redesigned the entire experience to be "card-based," which is the often-preferred design for mobile sites, only to block mobile users from using the site at all in favor of the app. They did such a bad job, and the outcry from the community was so great, that they kept around the old design and promised to maintain it indefinitely (which you can use at old.reddit.com). Further consider that mobile apps roughly triple the amount of things that need to get made, and unsurprisingly, their app is and always has been trash.

Here, Reddit, for now, is saved by the only thing that has ever made Reddit worthwhile — the community. Reddit, to its credit, is the most open of the big social media sites. It has always opened itself up to third-party developers, such as myself, to create things. Some of those third-party developers created alternatives to the official Reddit app. Unlike Reddit, some of these developers are actually very good at making thing. They have collaborated with the moderators to create a suite of moderation tools far superior to any Reddit itself has ever given its mods, which, and I cannot emphasize this enough, are all doing unpaid work for Reddit.

I call the moderators, developers, users, and so on a "community," but no functioning community would allow a for-profit company to dictate how the community must structure itself, taking into account only the company's own bottom line, and disregarding the so-called community's own needs. Neither should it allow a company to make money off its members' passions, without compensating the members. If Disney was asking members of the community to do all its landscaping, offering nothing in return, no matter how much the "volunteers" love gardening, there would rightfully be an outcry. Businesses don't get to be businesses when it's time to charge admission, or make decisions about how the community should operate, only to transform into sweet innocent communities when it is time to pay labor costs.

Now, finally, we have reached the current controversy. Reddit is attempting to force its third-party developers to pay them fees to create the things Reddit itself is incapable of creating, and which make Reddit a worthwhile place to be. By law, Reddit has always had this right, but they chose not to enforce it, thus allowing us to develop a digital commons. Now, as it gears up for an IPO, Reddit sees this commons as untapped revenue. The bean-counters, in their short-sighted greed, do not realize that the useless part of Reddit is Reddit itself.

This is digital enclosure. In the 16th century, English peasants often had common rights to land, which they used collectively. Eventually, the aristocracy decided this was inefficient, and in order to increase the value of the land for themselves, worked to revoke the rights held by common people. They enclosed fields, forcing the commons to the kind of walled-off, owner-tenant relationships with which we today are more familiar, and from which they could extract more rent. I propose that Reddit is doing the same. The community has self-organized, and made a thing much better than Reddit, the landlord, could ever have made. It now seeks to build fences and charge us rent while at the same time making it worse.

So we should black out the popular subreddits, and we should not stop there. In some ways, it is ironic that we are so angry at Reddit; it is the only company that has allowed a commons to develop at all. Other social media companies have kept their land tightly enclosed from the beginning, all while being fully dependent on its users to create all the content that makes them worthwhile. This is bullshit. We should demand more. Instead of working together to stop the internet from getting worse, a seemingly inevitable characteristic of internet platforms that Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification," let's come together to make it better. The people who do the work should have a say in how things gets run. If Reddit is going to profit off the work moderators do, they should pay them. YouTube does revenue sharing with its video creators, and even that is not enough. If these megaplatforms continue to exist (which they should not), if we are stuck with a handful of companies owning so much of the internet, it's well past time for the people who actually make the internet worthwhile to organize and demand a say in how these platforms operate. Reddit's moderators should black out the site and demand Reddit not get worse, and from there, they should unionize and demand a share of the revenue. No one should work for free for a publicly traded company.

But we shouldn't stop there. Platforms like Patreon, YouTube, Substack, OnlyFans, and even Twitter rely on the skilled labor of its contributors, yet their monopoly status lets them dictate the terms of how "content-creators" get paid, if at all. These platforms are empty vessels; they are worthless without us, yet they exercise complete control over so much of the internet, and we so little. They are enclosing the digital commons, yet somehow, by being abstract cyber-entities, they've tricked us into forgetting that they are just capitalists, profiting off the things we make for them, and they don't even pay us. For too long, capital has expanded to the internet, and instead of organizing against them, as we ought to have done, we unquestioningly followed, lulled by that sweet and elusive engagement — a thirst now only they can slake. We on the internet have made these companies not just rich, but seemingly indispensable to communication. Real, actually important news breaks over Twitter; people create "Twitter threads" during things like mass shootings and pandemics, and our collective addiction to Twitter makes it such that terrified people are forced to read several hundred words on the one place on the entire internet incapable of coherently rendering text. Facebook, a platform primarily for judging the wedding photos of people you don't actually like, is now monopolizing communications infrastructure in much of the world, forcing people to use only Facebook. Was that a worthwhile bargain? I'd argue no, but it was, and continues to be, an unnecessary one.