Reddit's Meltdown: Contextualizing AMAgeddon

I first learned about reddit from the webpage of a random computer science Ph.D student that I stumbled across in middle school. At the time it was a tiny community mostly consisting of programmers and scientists, but I fell in love with the way it facilitated discussion and new content. For those who are unfamiliar, reddit takes submissions from users of anything that can be hyperlinked - articles, images, text posts - and presents them in an interface that allows everyone to vote the individual pieces of content up or down, resulting in a constantly changing list of whatever everyone thinks is interesting as interpreted by their ranking algorithm. The upvote/downvote idea also applies in the the thread-based comment system of each submission, allowing users to promote posts that contribute to the discussion and (ideally) bury spurious or harmful comments.

        By the time I applied to college I was so enamored of the process of discovering and discussing news and ideas on the site that I wrote one of my college applications specifically about that (don’t worry, I got accepted). But over time my love affair with reddit has changed, particularly as its userbase has grown into the tens of millions, ushering in an eternal September that has rendered most of the default front page devoid of interesting content. Now I spend almost all of my time on reddit within the small community subforums, or subreddits, dedicated to the things in which I’m interested. I’ve come to appreciate the work of the moderators of these subreddits, who volunteer a huge amount of time and effort for free in order to keep up a high level of quality content and discussion.

        In response to recent events, this very community of moderators decided to take a stand against the neglect of the reddit administrators, something of which I had only been dimly aware until now. The result was a massive blackout of some of reddit’s largest communities.

What Happened

        On Thursday, July 2nd, the moderators of AMA (Ask Me Anything, a hugely popular sub where famous people wade in among the reddit masses and answer their various questions) were suddenly informed that their one single line of support and connection to celebrity AMA participants (a reddit employee named Victoria Taylor, username chooter) had been terminated from reddit. They did not receive adequate interim support or any kind of plan or resources to complete the AMAs they had scheduled over the next few days. In response, the mods of AMA shut down the subreddit by making it private, partly to work on the problem of how to conduct AMAs without Victoria but largely because they wanted to draw attention to how mistreated they felt by the reddit administrators (or admins, the official employees of reddit) in not even being adequately informed and supported at a time like this. This wasn’t the first time the mods had felt ignored by the admins, and they wanted to send a message.

        This seems to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, because this shutdown was followed by a huge series of other major subreddits being shut down by their moderators in protest against the reddit admins’ longstanding neglect of moderators. Many complained that the admins had been putting off the development of better moderator tools for years. And whenever the admins did put out a new - and sometimes unwanted - feature, they frequently failed to respond promptly to feedback (the most recent example of which is the new search results page, which got rid of certain options mods relied on - but the lack of responsiveness is not new either). The situation developed into a furor among both mods and regular users.

        After a day of being shut down the major subreddits slowly started coming back on Friday, and Alexis Ohanian (under the username kn0thing), one of the founders of reddit who recently returned to the company, posted an apology with some details about how things would run from now on, but only in private mod-only subreddits. Eventually Ellen Pao, the interim CEO of the company since former CEO Yishan Wong’s resignation, also posted an apology, acknowledging a history of neglect and promising a better approach in the future. This came after some problematic press comments from Pao, as well as a whole weekend during which many users felt that they had been ignored once again. They renewed the effort to bring about her resignation which has been ongoing since June, when she instituted a more strict anti-harassment policy on the site and banned a large subreddit (r/fatpeoplehate) in the process. Pao did point out that she tried to apologize at the beginning of the conflict, and in fact her earlier comment was posted the day after the subreddit shutdowns but was rendered totally invisible by huge numbers of downvotes. The voting system is a finicky beast when it comes to facilitating or dissipating reddit’s collective anger, and in this case it went directly down the route of facilitation.

What Led to This

The Mods

        Reddit started in 2005 as a small, user-centric community where admins, mods, and regular users all talked to each other freely and openly, like a small village. Today, reddit is among the top ten most viewed websites in the US, and among the top 40 in the world. This transition happened in a short period of time, with most of the growth taking place during the latter half of the site’s existence. And until fairly recently, although it was owned by Conde Nast, reddit operated on a “shoestring budget” and apparently faced difficulties in hiring enough people to keep up with the needs of the site and its users. As a result, tools and features for moderators were chronically underdeveloped, and after a while there was no real connection between the admins and the mods.

        Under Yishan Wong, who came on board after Conde Nast spun it off, reddit hired many more employees and got an infusion of $50 million which Wong intended to use to hire more people, build better moderation tools, and improve the interface between admins and the community. However, he stepped down unexpectedly and Ellen Pao came on as interim CEO. In a reddit comment made after the shutdowns Wong defends Pao by claiming that Pao was left to clean up the mess he made, although he doesn’t go into very many specifics. Whatever the situation was, the improved moderation tools and better interface with the community were not forthcoming under Pao’s leadership, and the steady buildup of discontent from administrative neglect continued. This has mostly been a source of tension between the moderators in general and the admins.

The Users

        Most average reddit users ("redditors") don’t really have a dog in the fight between admins and mods - they’re simply consumers of the content, so it makes little difference to them if admins are slow about updating mod tools. However, many redditors do have strong feelings about freedom of expression on reddit, and recent perceived changes in that freedom have fomented discontent among the masses.

        Yishan Wong had a weird stance regarding freedom of speech on reddit during his tenure, and while it drew some criticism from outside the site, redditors in general were perfectly fine with his opposition to banning questionable subreddits, sketchy reasoning notwithstanding.

        Ellen Pao, however, has taken a tougher stance on reddit’s unsavory parts. She most famously purged a number of subreddits last month under her new policy of removing subreddits that facilitate harassment, which led to a huge reddit rebellion later christened “the Fattening”. Many felt that the new policies were tantamount to censorship, and it fanned fears of reddit being “groomed” in order to render it safe and palatable for advertisers to exploit the site’s money-making ability. It was this that began the trend of redditors referring to her as “Chairman Pao” and led to the creation of the sub r/PaoMustResign, and thus by the time of Victoria Taylor’s firing both mods and users were already angry with the admins. The users and the mods were separate powderkegs, but the spark of Taylor’s termination was enough to ignite both.

How I Feel About It

        Now that the dust has somewhat cleared and we’ve had a good look at the issues involved, I find myself agreeing with user geofft on hackernews. That is to say, the mods are in the right regarding being neglected by the admins, and the admins are in the right regarding banning harmful subreddits. Those two things were blended together in this particular fiasco, with the users co-opting the grievances of the mods as well as just railing against the admins (and Pao) for “censoring” them. Some redditors are also making an issue out of the still-unknown reason for Taylor’s sudden termination from the company, but I don’t feel that merits discussion as all that can be gotten from it is speculation and rumor-mongering. For those who wish to prod her about it, though, she is still active on reddit.

        While I say that the admins are culpable for the poor state of communication between them and the mods, I also think the admins just didn’t fully understand the unique dynamics of the community they handle. As a result I think they misallocated time and resources when they finally had money available to do so. They focused on cosmetic or otherwise trivial changes to the site while responding only minimally to negative user feedback, and they failed to work on the things that make the community run smoothly and well. Because I feel that they just didn’t understand this stuff to begin with, I would like to believe Ellen Pao when she says that her eyes have been opened and that she wants to change these things. I am however reserved about this, at least until I see evidence of actual changes taking place. I’ll celebrate when reddit hires more employees dedicated to interfacing with the moderator and user communities and builds of modern, robust moderator tools.

        The right to free speech clearly stops short of causing others harm, and the reddit administrators are right to want to curtail that kind of activity on reddit. As much as I hate to say it, as long as racist or pornographic or otherwise objectionable subreddits aren’t negatively affecting or ruining unsuspecting peoples’ lives (as r/fatpeoplehate, r/jailbait, and r/creepshots almost certainly were), then they should be allowed to exist. Anything that crosses that line should be stopped, and any community that consistently crosses it should be banned. While I’m sure there are fine philosophical arguments to be made here, in my mind there is a big difference between talking about hating people as a group and actually victimizing individuals. As long as the admins are careful and selective about their criteria for axing subreddits, I think they should keep doing what they’re doing.

        I am bothered by the managerial, corporate-PR tone of Ohanian and Pao’s response posts on the site (“we hear you” having been said multiple times), because that indicates a loss of the kind of community involvement and up-frontness from the admins that was so endearing about reddit’s early days, but I also don’t think there’s any going back from this. Reddit is now one of the biggest and most popular websites in the world and it’s potentially worth quite a lot of money because of that. Once otherwise down-to-earth community-oriented founders like Ohanian get a taste of that, that’s the direction they want for it, and their interests are no longer automatically in line with those of the community. As far as I’m concerned, if the admins can just step out of the way of the mods and help them do their jobs, I’ll be happy with the small, obscure, personable communities on reddit where everyone knows each other. Doing that is probably in reddit’s best interest both as a money-making venture and a community - without its users it is neither of those things.