A strike of sorts began on Reddit on June 12, when thousands of volunteer moderators set their forums to private, temporarily depriving users of the ability to bathe themselves in the minutiae of such groups as r/Gaming, r/Piano or r/IDontWorkHereLady. While many forums—subreddits, in Redditese—have come back online, others are still not functioning normally, and some of the fans of the site have been questioning whether this is the beginning of the end.
The trouble started when Reddit, which began setting the stage for an IPO in late 2021, announced a plan to begin charging businesses and developers for access to its application programming interface (API), an existing tool through which they can gain access to Reddit content to build their own products and services. As the details of the plan became clear, many moderators concluded the effort would break Reddit in key ways and pressed co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Steve Huffman to change course. He refused, the subreddits went private, and the two sides exchanged public vitriol while trying to iron things out behind the scenes.
Reddit was started in 2005 and sold to Condé Nast a year later. It’s now an independent company, but counts Advance Publications Inc., Condé Nast’s parent, as its biggest shareholder. The site, which operates as a collection of message boards and relies largely on advertising for revenue, periodically descends into flame wars between moderators and management, and it’s tempting to interpret what’s happening solely through the lens of the persistent weirdness of the Reddit culture. This is not the sort of thing, after all, that happens on Snapchat or Instagram.
