In search of an IPO in New York and flashes of Times Square, Reddit must for the moment struggle against a “blackout” and a strike by its most loyal users. Started on June 12, the protest by volunteer moderators continues and still makes it impossible to view new messages on thousands of the platform’s most popular discussion forums.
Since Reddit’s inception eighteen years ago, tensions have been common between site management and moderators. But the gap seems to have never been greater, the general manager, Steve Huffman, even fearing attacks against his employees and calling on them to avoid wearing their sweatshirts with the Reddit logo in public. “Some people are very upset,” he pointed out in an internal memo.
Little thumb of social networks
Known for its user-driven moderation system, unlike the thousands of employees employed by Meta and TikTok to track down illegal comments, Reddit claims 57 million visitors per day and 430 million per month. But the announced project of an imminent arrival on Wall Street now encourages Steve Huffman to push the fires on monetization. Even if it means triggering a real cultural revolution within the ecosystem that revolves around the platform.
With less than 1 billion dollars in annual revenue, Reddit is, it is true, the figure of Tom Thumb of social networks. For example, Pinterest generates three times more revenue. To speed up, Reddit had already made it known that it intended make companies pay like OpenAI which relies on its data to train artificial intelligence.
A new “exorbitant” price
But the measure hid a wolf. The multiple applications developed in parallel with the platform by independent publishers, thanks to the programming interface of Reddit, will also have to pay for this technological tool so far provided free of charge. “The price is exorbitant”, was indignant the creator of Narwhal, after a call from the Reddit teams unofficially telling him the price he will have to pay from 1er July.
3.4
million dollars This is the value of volunteer work done each year by Reddit moderators according to researchers at the University of Evanston (Illinois).
“June 30 will be the last day of Apollo,” decided Christian Selig, the boss of the best known of these alternative applications, after realizing that he would have to pay $20 million a year to Reddit. Heavy users of these applications, the moderators went on strike a few days later.
Reddit plays the one-upmanship
But after ten days of anger, Reddit management doesn’t seem ready to revise the anger-inducing provisions. On the contrary, Steve Huffman played one-upmanship by indicating during an interview with NBC that he was considering allowing Reddit readers to vote to remove forum moderators from their posts. He said things were back to normal on 80% of the top 5,000 forums and a majority of site visitors did not support moderators.
By raising his voice as he does, Steve Huffman however takes the risk of damaging one of the key ets of the platform’s economic model. Unlike other social networks that spend a fortune in moderation, Reddit benefits from the daily working hours of its volunteers. If the latter had to be paid, a university study had estimated the bill at 3.4 million dollars per year.