Reddit doubles down

Delaying its API changes would benefit everyone — but users have other options, too

Programming note: Barring big news, Platformer will be off Thursday as I take a personal day. Hard Fork will publish Friday as usual. Monday is the Juneteenth holiday, so expect to see us back in your inbox on Tuesday.

When a platform’s user base is in revolt, it generally has two choices. The company can make concessions to users, walking back an unpopular change or offering some other consolation. Or it can keep calm and carry on, betting that the furor will subside after a few news cycles and allow the company to return to business as usual.

On Monday, I wrote about the revolt at Reddit, where plans to begin charging developers to use the company’s formerly free API is expected to crush the most popular third-party clients — and might also put moderation tools, accessibility-focused apps, and other enhancements to the network at risk. In response, moderators have made thousands of the site’s most popular forums private, essentially taking them offline. They have called on Reddit’s leaders to reverse the changes and ensure that third-party development of the network’s ecosystem can continue.

Today we got our most solid indication to date of how Reddit plans to handle this revolt — and CEO Steve Huffman is making it clear that the company does not intend to offer any concessions. He said as much in a memo to employees that leaked to Mia Sato and Jay Peters at The Verge.

Huffman told employees:

There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.

Huffman is right that, in the end, the whole situation reflects a product problem: the native Reddit apps, both on desktop and on mobile, are ugly and difficult to use. (In particular, I find the nested comments under each post bizarrely difficult to expand or collapse; the tap targets for your fingers are microscopic.) Reddit didn’t really navigate the transition to mobile devices so much as it endured it; it’s little wonder that millions of the service’s power users have sought refuge in third-party apps with more modern designs.

On the whole, though, Huffman’s bet against the sustained energy of the Reddit community appears to have misfired.

Over the past day, the number of Reddits that have gone dark expanded from around 7,000 to more than 8,400. And in response to Huffman’s dismissive memo, moderators of hundreds of communities now say they will extend the blackout indefinitely beyond its planned two days.

Here’s Peters again at The Verge:

“Reddit has budged microscopically,” u/SpicyThunder335, a moderator for r/ModCoord, wrote in the post. They say that despite an announcement that access to a popular data-archiving tool for moderators would be restored, “our core concerns still aren’t satisfied, and these concessions came prior to the blackout start date; Reddit has been silent since it began.” SpicyThunder335 also bolded a line from a Monday memo from CEO Steve Huffman obtained by The Verge — “like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well” — and said that “more is needed for Reddit to act.”

Ahead of the Tuesday post, more than 300 subreddits had committed to staying dark indefinitely, SpicyThunder335 said. The list included some hugely popular subreddits, like r/aww (more than 34 million subscribers), r/music (more than 32 million subscribers), and r/videos (more than 26 million subscribers). Even r/nba committed to an indefinite timeframe at arguably the most important time of the NBA season. But SpicyThunder335 invited moderators to share pledges to keep the protests going, and the commitments are rolling in.

Thousands of subreddits likely will come back online within the next day, if only out of a sense of obligation to their own communities. But the indefinite loss of forums with tens of millions of subscribers seems likely to sting. (Certainly it’s stinging the quality of Google search results.)

If Reddit hopes to de-escalate the situation, it seems to me that it has two clear options. One is that it could reduce the announced pricing for its API to ensure third-party developers can continue their work. But this seems unlikely: Reddit’s clear objective here is to wind down third-party app development and push users to its own native app, which it has promised to improve.

That leads to the second option, which is to simply slow down. One of the most upsetting things about the API changes, from developers’ perspective, is that many of their users bought annual subscriptions, and Reddit’s new pricing takes effect at the end of this month. That leaves them little time to make things right with their customers. 

One criticism I heard of my piece yesterday is that Reddit had given developers more than 30 days’ notice, contrary to what some developers have complained about. But when Reddit first announced that it would charge for API access, it did not specify prices or what kinds of apps would be affected. The communication failure led to widespread confusion about how tools related to content moderation, accessibility, and independent research would be affected, and Reddit has been trying to dig its way out of that hole ever since.

That leaves room for Reddit to grant developers another six months to a year before the API changes take effect. By delaying the move, developers would get the time they need to either figure out sustainable business models or shut down without stiffing their customers on months of expected service. Reddit, in turn, could use that same time to build the improvements to moderation tools and the core app that it insists are coming soon.

Assuming not even that happens, though, there are other options.

One possibility is that, in the grand tradition of forum drama throughout internet history, big subreddits will simply decamp for other hosting solutions. If that seems like a pipe dream — and I apologize for the unfortunate example — look at the story of TheDonald. The violent, racist subreddit was banned in 2020 for violating Reddit’s content policies. But its membership quickly rebuilt elsewhere, at a site I will not link to, using an interface quite similar to Reddit’s. 

Of course, it would have been better for the internet if TheDonald had simply disbanded. But the fact that it continued once being booted off Reddit illustrates how little Reddit itself brought to the community — and how easily other, more reputable subreddits might build new homes elsewhere, so long as their users have the will.

On Monday, I mentioned that my favorite subreddit had gone dark; a commenter let me know that some members had already set up shop on Kbin, a decentralized Reddit alternative that is interoperable with Mastodon and other services on the ActivityPub standard. While the interface is rough even by the standards of Reddit, it works just fine. And if the Fediverse continues to develop at its current pace, it might soon work much better than that.

Then again, of course, Huffman may be right. Statistically, the furor over Reddit’s API changes will pass, and power users will resign themselves to the imperfect convenience of having all their favorite niche communities in a single place. 

But for now, at least, anger seems to be building. And given the rapid fragmentation of online social networking, what happens next seems increasingly hard to predict. It’s true that most social media controversies eventually blow over. Other times, though, they blow up. 

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On the podcast this week: Kevin and I debate Reddit’s next move. Plus, Max Read joins to discuss the confounding character that is MrBeast, and why platforms are giving up on 2020 election lies.

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Governing

• Google called on the U.S. government to distribute oversight of AI to multiple agencies in a “hub-and-spoke” model instead of taking the suggestion of Microsoft and OpenAI and creating a single AI regulator. (Cristiano Lima and David DiMolfetta / The Washington Post)

• In a wide-ranging interview, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella discussed the company’s collaboration with OpenAI, the future of Bing, the prospect of AGI, and his thoughts on AI safety and regulation. Notably, Nadella said “we shouldn't allow” AI to destroy humankind. (Steven Levy / Wired)

• Research into social media’s effect on teenagers has produced mixed and imprecise results, complicating both genuine measures designed to protect children’s mental health and the recent flurry of legislative attacks on platforms. (Kaitlyn Tiffany / The Atlantic)

• Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration said Jack Dorsey was lying when he claimed India threatened to shut down Twitter unless it restricted content critical of the government. Dorsey made the comments this week in an interview with YouTube show Breaking Points. I believe him! (Shilpa Jamkhandikar, Aditya Kalra and Kanishka Singh / Reuters)

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Industry

• Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI is causing tension between the two firms over how freely the startup should work with competitors, and whether Microsoft is moving too fast to integrate AI tech into products. (Tom Dotan and Deepa Seetharaman / WSJ)

• Meta unveiled I-JEPA, a new computer vision model that uses abstractions of images as opposed to relying on labeled data sets in a way that better mimics how humans learn new concepts. (Mike Wheatley / SiliconAngle)

• Meta is adding a text-based “world chat” to Horizon Worlds to let any user message anyone else in the same session, but with the option to blur messages from strangers. The blur setting will be on by default for users aged 13 to 17. (Steve Dent / Engadget)

• Google’s new Search Generative Experience often plagiarizes articles when summarizing, raising concerns about copyright, the open web and potential anticompetitive effects on news publishers. A very fun read, at least for media people preparing their lawsuits. (Avram Piltch / Tom’s Hardware)

• Google’s return-to-office push, which includes tracking employee badges for performance review purposes, is drawing the ire of workers, who say it makes them feel like schoolchildren. In fairness most of their questions at TGIF are about snacks. (Jennifer Elias / CNBC)

• YouTube is lowering the requirements to join its Partner Program, which includes improved monetization tools, from needing 1,000 subscribers to only 500. (Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch)

• Paul McCartney said he used AI to help finish a John Lennon song believed to be the 1978 track “Now and Then” and plans to release it later this year as the “final Beatles record.” (Mark Savage / BBC)

• Amazon confirmed that it quietly started using generative AI to summarize product reviews, but declined to say what underlying AI models it’s using. (Annie Palmer / CNBC)

• Oracle founder Larry Ellison overtook Bill Gates as the fourth-richest person in the world — with a net worth of nearly $130 billion — thanks to the AI boom pushing Oracle stock to its all-time high. (Biz Carson / Bloomberg)

• Apple warned the creators of decentralized social media app Damus that it will remove the software if they don’t update it to remove a Bitcoin tipping feature. Not because of the crypto element, but — of course! — because the tipping feature doesn’t use in-app purchase and circumvents Apple’s 30% cut. (Yogita Khatri / The Block)

• The hundreds of startups designed to support mid-level and rising influencers are pivoting or shutting down because the creator economy never materialized like the industry promised. (Kaya Yurieff / The Information)

• Netflix plans to enter the live sports streaming market later this year with a celebrity golf tournament combining high-profile names from its Formula One docu-series Drive to Survive and golf series Full Swing. (Sarah Krouse and Jessica Toonkel / WSJ)

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