Just under a week from now, changes done to Reddit’s policy will cause several excellent third-party apps to cease functioning. The more vocal members of the community are up in arms about it, claiming this sort of profiteering and the overall Douche-like behavior of Reddit CEO Steve Huffman as an affront to the community at large.
I’m surprised because it implies that they thought that Reddit was doing things out of the goodness of its heart.
It implies that everyone forgot that Reddit is a business. That they didn’t see what Wikia did by creating a platform and taking on all of the boring and complicated bits of running a website. Free content is a goldmine for someone bold and unburdened with an excess of concern. And when you don’t have anyone on your community who knows their way around a server, it’s easy to get locked in the crutches of someone who does…for a price.
Denizens of the earlier internet remember when this was not an issue because most of us would see centralization with a healthy amount of paranoia. Even two forums joining was reason to be suspicious. The flip side of course was that the moderators and admins needed to do some actual work. There had to become at least someone who knew how to set up vBulletin or phpBB. And once that was done some one would have to put up the cash for said hosting and the domain name. It wasn’t just “create forum”…most of the time at least.
To say that it’s a complex issue is underselling it. It’s not 2004 anymore and the expectation that everyone on the internet knows what they’re doing is somehow even more ludicrous now than it was then. More people means more communities and less tech-inclined people (proportionally) to support them. A successful platform like Reddit should be compensated for its efforts to ease the creation and upkeep of these communities. On the other hand, the centralization of communities creates issue’s with moderation, transparency in management, profiting off free labor (that users enjoy creating content doesn’t mean that it isn’t labor), and the one spurring the creation of this article, overt profiteering.
If you are shocked that this happened as Reddit gets closer to filing their IPO, I have a bridge to sell you. And no matter how many half-hearted protests are done, Huffman and by extension everyone on his executive committee have made their interest in the wellbeing of their users quite clear. Shut up and use our platform, and you better get used to being the product.
It’s not quite “Fuck you, pay me”, but it’s not far off. With any luck this will just be an opening shot in the long downward slog of Reddit, to culminate in either a new large platform replacing it and resetting the doom timer, or some communities realizing that creating your own independent forum is not that hard.
So what can we learn from these shambles? Basically, distrust any platform that doesn’t occasionally have to scramble a donation drive just to be able to make it to next year. And distrust some that do anyway.
