What the Reddit blackouts mean for unpaid content moderators

The feud between Reddit and its subreddit moderators could change the future of searchable information on the internet, researchers and moderators say.

Thousands of popular Reddit communities dedicated to topics ranging from Apple to gaming and music locked out their users earlier last month in protest against the company's plan to charge for access to its data.

Third-party apps like Apollo, BaconReader, Sync, and others that used Reddit's API for free have now gone dark - unable to afford the prices Reddit set to make money from AI companies scraping its platform.

The ensuing protest, which began over access to moderator tools and unfair pricing, soon became a catalyst for broader issues about Reddit's relationship with its volunteers.

So what does this mean for the future of volunteer-run platforms?

How important are Reddit's subreddits/moderators?

Reddit is primarily text-based content, which makes it a source of easily searchable information on a wide variety of topics.

Reddit moderators keep the subreddits - the company's word for its communities - free from spam and off-topic material.

Research from Northwestern University in 2022 estimates that moderators' work is worth approximately $3.4 million per year to Reddit.

Users had also appended "reddit" to the end of Google searches in order to improve their results, with Google eventually integrating it as a feature of Search in September 2022, labelled "discussions and forums".

As such, the blackout has made it harder for people to find information if they did not already belong to a specific subreddit.

What does AI have to do with the protests?

Reddit's conversation forums have a lot of data that can be used to train tools such as ChatGPT, the viral chatbot from Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

Reddit chief executive Steve Huffman told The New York Times that the "Reddit corpus of data is really valuable" and he does not want to "need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free."

However, some moderators have pointed to the irony of Reddit benefiting from free labour and user content while complaining of other companies doing so.

"For a lot of us, moderating Reddit is a good chunk of our lives," user HeyMoon, who requested to use their pseudonym, told Context.

"I have moderated r/politics around five hours, most days of the week (since 2016), providing real, monetary value to Reddit. The least they can do is respect what we want ... We aren't the kings, we're the damn janitors of this website."

A Reddit spokesperson said that “users have been vocal about wanting their communities back open”, and there are a  “significant number of users and mods who disagree with some mod teams and the actions they’re taking”.

 “In the future, we could look at developing a way for community members to vote out a mod if they disagree with decisions being made that impact the entire community,” they said in emailed comments.

Human content creation and moderation is also needed to avoid 'model collapse', researchers say - when the data AI models generate contaminates the data used to train other algorithms.

"The value of data collected about genuine human interactions with systems will be increasingly valuable in the presence of content generated by LLMs (large language models) in data crawled from the Internet", Oxford University's Ilia Shumailov wrote in research published last month.

However Greg Taylor of Oxford University's Internet Institute said that AI will bring content benefits too.

"I take a more optimistic view (that) LLMs will increase the supply of useful content as well as spam", he said.

"So long as people continue to need relevant and useful information, there will be an opportunity for entrepreneurs and technologists who can serve that need."

Is there a future for volunteer-based content moderation?

Reddit moderators expressed frustration with the company's priorities, but said that the core act of volunteering was still vital.

Max Schlienger, a Reddit user who moderates popular subreddits like r/Funny, r/Pics, /r/Showerthoughts, told Context that Reddit's free content and moderation practices were initally a draw for him.

"However, I also think that there needs to be real appreciation for those efforts (from the entities who are financially benefiting from them, at the very least) if they're going to continue", he said.

"Even the most well-intentioned, altruistic volunteer isn't immune to discouragement."

Schlienger also criticised what he characterised as Reddit's focus on "ill-conceived fixtures like NFT-based avatars" instead of addressing "rampant bigotry, spam, low-effort content, and misinformation on its platform."

Reddit did not reply to a request for comment.

Can platforms be created and maintained if they are not for-profit?

Some subreddits have moved to discussion platforms like Lemmy and Kbin, in the same way users migrated from Twitter to Mastodon, which provide decentralised services similar to Reddit.

These platforms are significantly smaller than Reddit but they are not overseen by a single company.

"Capitalist enterprises will always take as much as they can from labor and distribute that wealth to management. The free labor of content moderation on a message board is no different", said Justin Anthony Knapp, a Wikipedia moderator responsible for over one million edits.

"On Wikipedia (which is a non-profit), the literal economics and political economics are somewhat different ... as there are assumptions of impartiality with admins."

This article was updated on July 3, 2023, to include latest updates on third-party Reddit apps shutting down.

(Reporting by Adam Smith; Editing by Zoe Tabary.)