After weeks of burning through users’ goodwill, Reddit is facing a moderator strike and an exodus of its most important users. It’s the latest example of a social media site making a critical mistake: users aren’t there for the services, they’re there for the community. Building barriers to access is a war of attrition.
Reddit has an admirable record when it comes to defending an open and free internet. While not always perfect, the success of the site is owed to its model of empowering moderators and users to engage with the site in a way that makes sense for them. This freedom for communities to experiment with and extend the platform let it continue to thrive while similar sites, like Fark and Digg, lost major chunks of their user base after making controversial and restrictive design choices to raise profitability.
Reddit maintained openness in two notable ways through its history. It supported community-led moderation from volunteer workers, and it embraced developers looking for automated access to the site, through open protocols (e.g. RSS) and a free API.
What Reddit got right
Content moderation doesn’t work at scale. Any scheme which attempts it is bound to fail. For sites which need continuous user growth, that is a problem. So what can they do? Well, we know what doesn’t work:
- Simply having minimal or no moderation results in a trash fire of bigotry and illegal content, quickly hemorrhaging any potential revenue and potentially landing a platform in legal trouble.
- Automating moderation inevitably blocks legitimate content that wasn’
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