Unexpected Changes Resulting from Reddit Blackout

The impact of the Reddit blackout is becoming evident, but it seems that the organizers’ intentions may not be realized. Instead of reversing the API policy changes that will result in the closure of third-party apps like Apollo, the company’s leadership has consistently reaffirmed their stance.

“I think it’s time for us to grow up and act like a grown-up company,” CEO Steve Huffman told NPR. “These people who are mad, they’re mad because they got something for free, but now it’s not going to be free,” he said in an interview with The Verge. Reddit also used a media blitz to downplay the impact of the blackout, with more than 8,000 subreddits going dark at its peak. , which was so unstable that it temporarily overturned the entire platform. .

Although the first 48-hour blackout is over, the protest is far from over. Thousands of subreddits remain private or restricted. These include the massively popular r/funny with over 40 million subscribers, as well as r/aww, r/Music and others with tens of millions of subscribers. Many of the moderators of these subreddits say they plan to continue their protests indefinitely.

In the short term, the blackout of massive Reddit communities doesn’t just affect Redditors. It also has a big impact on search results because so many people rely on the platform’s core conversations for collective advice, discussions and shared knowledge. As many have pointed out, one of the biggest immediate effects of the outage wasn’t a vastly different homepage, but search results that lead to dead ends instead of answers.

But there are other, long-term effects that we’re just beginning to get a hint of. First, the blackout could lead to significant changes in Reddit’s own policies and how it works with moderators. In an interview with NBC News, Huffman suggested he was considering changing the site’s rules to make it easier to remove moderators.

From NBC:

Huffman, also a Reddit co-founder, said he plans to pursue changes to Reddit’s moderator removal policy to allow ordinary users to vote moderators out more easily if their decisions aren’t popular. He said the new system would be more democratic and allow a wider set of people to hold moderators accountable.

One change that is “really important,” he said, “is making sure that, for example, the protests, now or in the future, are actually representative of their communities. And I think that may have been the case for many at the beginning of this week, but that’s less and less the case as time goes on.

A post by Reddit admins also hinted at such a change. In response to a question on r/ModSuport, a company representative made a similar point. “Active communities are trusted by thousands or even millions of users, and we have a responsibility to keep these spaces active,” the unnamed employee wrote. “If the moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod who wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove from the mod team those who no longer want to moderate.”

Although the post mentioned Reddit’s current moderator policies, some longtime Moderators have interpreted the comment as a direct threat. So far, it’s unclear how Reddit’s policies might change among its legions of volunteer moderators. The company did not immediately respond to questions about whether it plans to change its moderator removal policy. But at least it seems like Reddit is at least interested in changing the power dynamic that has historically given its unpaid moderators a lot of influence over the platform

Meanwhile, the blackout has affected Reddit in other important ways. There’s been a small but growing push among some power users towards connected Reddit alternatives like Lemmy and kbin. These decentralized platforms are still niche markets and face many of the same challenges as Mastodon and other Twitter alternatives. Still, there seems to be a growing interest in some parts of Reddit in recent weeks. Other large communities are simply moving to a more familiar platform: Discord.

And as much as Reddit management tries to downplay the impact of the blackout, advertisers have noticed. According to AdWeek, some ad buyers have at least temporarily suspended advertising while they wait for the power outage to end. And while Huffman has suggested that the company’s ad revenue hasn’t taken a significant hit from the protest, that could change if it takes hold in the endless communities that advertisers are particularly interested in. “[Advertisers] didn’t want to be subject to users’ opinions on Reddit’s decisions,” one unnamed ad buyer told the publication.

All of this could end up leaving Reddit in a much different place than it was before the blackout. As Rory Mir, deputy director of the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, recently wrote, Reddit seems to be following a familiar pattern. “However, we see time and time again that when a platform turns its back on the community, it doesn’t end well,” Mir said. “They rebel and flee, and the ship is left trying to wring dwindling profits from the vast wreckage.”