For the past 11 years, Bucky has put time and effort into managing and mentoring dozens of communities on Reddit, the sprawling Internet bulletin board.
As the “moderator” of about 80 different topic-based forums, Bucky — who goes by the name of “BuckRowdy” on Reddit and asked that his full name not be used to avoid online harassment — and others like him are essential to growing and maintaining of the social media site, one of the internet’s largest destinations for online discussions.
Until two weeks ago, when Bucky rebelled.
Reddit had just made changes that greatly increased fees for independent developers who build apps using the company’s data. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman positioned the move in part as a way to bolster the company’s finances as it heads toward a highly anticipated IPO.
But the changes made it so expensive for some third-party developers that a handful of people who built tools for Reddit’s moderators had to shut down or significantly change their apps. In protest, Bucky and other moderators shut down hundreds of forums on the site, effectively making Reddit useless for many of its 57 million daily visitors. At one point, the site went completely offline.
“It’s really demoralizing,” Bucky said. Being a Reddit moderator and interacting with users is already hard, he said. “‘I take all this abuse for you and keep your website clean, and this is how you pay us back?'”
Reddit, an 18-year-old site that was part of an early wave of social networking, has been trying to “come of age,” Mr Huffman said in interviews. What’s unclear is whether Reddit’s community will allow it.
San Francisco-based Reddit has spent the last few years trying to turn a gritty Internet bulletin board into a full-fledged social media company by adding executives and bolstering its advertising capabilities. The 2,000-person company — which has repeatedly been named as an IPO candidate — has raised more than $1.3 billion and is valued at more than $10 billion, according to public statements from Crunchbase and Reddit.
Other social media companies also made similar changes as they grew up. In 2012, Twitter changed its rules on how developers could use its data before it became public, infuriating users and strangling some popular third-party apps. Facebook has similarly made platform changes that have irked developers and caused backlash.
But this month’s revolt on Reddit stands out because it shows the outsized power of the site’s community. The day after moderators closed hundreds of Reddit forums, users spent 16 percent less time on the site, according to estimates from Compareweb, an analytics firm.
“Reddit is basically completely community-led,” said Adrian Horning, a Reddit user and data scientist which built a bot that ‘scrapes’ the site’s data in response to the rate changes. “The power that regular users have is just inherent to the platform.”
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Huffman said his goal was to make Reddit better for newbies and power users and to build a sustainable business. He said he regretted that developers were surprised by the company’s pricing changes and wished he had been more candid about how the changes affected them. He added that there was widespread concern about Reddit’s changes being part of a natural “maturation process.”
“We have the same love for Reddit and the same fear of losing Reddit as many of our users,” he said.
Mr. Huffman and Alexis Ohanian founded Reddit in 2005 as a site with a countercultural attitude to the Internet and its ad-based economy. Reddit embraced freedom of speech, zero ads, and an insular culture at all costs that laid the foundation for Web 2.0’s meme culture.
The community has long been boisterous, which has landed Reddit in hot water many times. In 2013, it was the site where internet sleuths searched — and misidentified — the Boston Marathon bombing suspect. A year later, it became a dumping ground for nude photos hacked from celebrities’ cellphones.
But as the site grew and investment poured in, its leaders saw the potential for Reddit to build a business. The company had several CEOs, including former venture capitalist Ellen Pao, before Mr. Huffman – who had left the company for six years – was brought back in 2015.
Mr. Huffman eventually embraced the idea that Reddit could make money from advertising, a model he once detested. He accepted and expanded rule changes instituted by Ms. Pao to include some of the toxic content people posted on the site. By 2021, he had filed confidential paperwork to take Reddit public.
But when interest rates soared last year and the stock market faltered, Mr. Huffman halted Reddit’s IPO plans. Since then he has worked systematically to improve the site, increase the number of users and strengthen the company’s bottom line.
In April, Mr. Huffman said he intended to restrict access to Reddit’s application programming interface, known in the industry as API. The API is the main gateway for outsiders to use the company’s data for various purposes.
In an interview at the time, Mr Huffman said he wanted big companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook to pay for access to Reddit data, which has been used to train so-called large language models that are at the heart of artificially intelligent systems. .
But Mr. Huffman gave no details about how API access prices would change and who would be affected. In May, Reddit began telling developers its much higher pricing plans for such access. Earlier this month, a developer of a popular app, Apollo, announced that he would close the app because Reddit’s changes would cost him more than $20 million in annual fees to use the app.
Many Redditors were deeply upset that Mr. Huffman seemed to be killing off a beloved app to build his business. Old-timers were also angry that the heady days of Reddit’s anti-capitalist roots seemed to be officially over.
Mr. Huffman defended the decision, noting that it costs Reddit millions of dollars to support apps like Apollo, which don’t send money back to the company and don’t serve ads from Reddit’s ad partners.
To express their displeasure, dozens of “supermods” soon restricted access to hundreds of Reddit’s most popular communities. To stop ads in those communities, known as subreddits, moderators posted pornography and other explicit material to force the forums to be labeled “18+” forums, which are generally not advertiser-friendly. Other forms of protest included a move by one subreddit, r/pics, to allow only photos of John Oliver to be shared on the forum. (Mr. Oliver embraced the Reddit protest and ended up sharing photos of himself, too.)
Mr. Huffman said he had no intention of changing course. He said Reddit was enforcing its moderator code of conduct, which prohibits moderators from closing their subreddits and posting pornography and images of violence on their forums (unless the forums are designated for such discussion topics). Reddit also said it would replace moderators who broke the rules after being warned.
Bucky said the protests, which have died down this week, have now progressed to more widespread frustrations that have built up over time.
“Every time we see these kinds of outbursts, there’s a simmering rage under the surface that comes back to the surface,” he said.
For now, subreddits seem to be slowly coming back online, though efforts are still being made to resist the changes. Bucky said he was active in the “Save3rdPartyApps” subreddit, which was created to host protests on the site that are allowed under Reddit’s rules.
Reddit is now further from a public offering than it was last year, Mr Huffman said, but will continue to build its business. He added that community revolt was part of what made Reddit Reddit and said he and his team planned to continue with top moderators angry at the changes.
“For better or worse, this is a very unique Reddit moment,” he said. “This can only happen on Reddit.”
