I also keep coming back to the metaphor that Reddit is a great deal like Gormenghast: an ancient, stony fortification of cobbled-together structures, housing a gaggle of idiosyncratic personas whose lives are filled with the performances of abstruse rituals and obligations, the mandatory detritus of a former glory — insular and in a state of glacial decadence, and which nevertheless has a secondary community plastered on its boundary, with which it perfunctorily yet regularly interacts AND YET all of which exists within a much wider world that has largely diverged from it.
If they pick moderators, those moderators are no longer volunteers, but employees & agents of Reddit, Inc. — and because of legal precedents with how moderators were engaged with AOL & LiveJournal, anything those technically-employee-agents of Reddit, Inc do wrong with respect to criminal activity and torts, Reddit Inc is on the hook for.
That’s why they use the volunteer mod model, and why they keep us at arm’s-length, and mandate that we cannot receive any compensation of any kind from anyone for moderating.
That said —
The mod code of conduct gives them avenues for removing mods that violate it; there’s also neutral admin-developed tools that identify users who are already active in helping the community out as potential moderator recruits.
So mods that close subreddits maliciously — with an intent to damage Reddit or to demand that they disburse money to a third party — could be removed from mod privileges, and replacements found.
Facebook is a former juggernaut of manipulating midwesterners and grandparents by driving them to bigoted echo chambers and serving them Republican targeted adverts. Now it is a wasteland of corporate pages and zombie meme groups, extremist recruitment groups for SE Asian political parties, coordination for death squads on the African continent, etc. it is impossible to host a town square or public commons discussion there.
Twitter is owned by a “libertarian” Republican techbro bigot who was financed by private Saudi equity after conversations with Thiel and a bunch of other alt-Right figures. It is swiftly become 4chan.
There are no longer Google+ forums; all the other message boards save for slashdot are unmoderated post apocalyptic horror shows roamed by Mad Max gangs (or fifteen year old gamers imagining they’re in Mad Max). Even Tumblr has at-scale difficulties countering & preventing hatred & harassment. They have no volunteer mods.
Reddit cleaned up starting in 2019. It’s home to many communities which are exactly as diverse, vibrant, and rewarding as they make themselves to be.
Reddit isn’t going to go under. It cannot. It has to persevere.
The AI “gold rush” has already left the station, yyeeeaarrsss ago. The people who are going to monetize it are the people for whom the threshold of entry to the data sets is an insignificant threshold even at tens of thousands of dollars a year - and they’re the same entities already owning rights to datasets. And don’t need Reddit’s.
They could Elsevier a bunch of researchers who get institutional grants, but that’s not going to be a predictable, dependable, forecastable revenue stream.
For anyone with experience in pricing data services for partners, and anyone with experience with auditable, publicly owned businesses (like Reddit is trying to become, through IPO)
the API TOS & the “premium” firehose pricing is about having all the costs and cost centres of their business operations either justified by a revenue stream, or having a potential revenue stream assigned to those cost centres, or having a business case justifying the existence of that cost and cost centre, OR having a pricing model on that aspect of business which justifies it only being operated as a distinctly separate business model from the main business.
If that happens, then they’d likely spin it off as a subsidiary business, or a licensor, and operate it in a way that locks down their liability from privacy violation cases or GDPR violation cases etc.
In short: Reddit isn’t doing this for an “AI Gold Rush”. Reddit is doing this because they have to structure their business operations in a way that limits liabilities, minimizes or justifies cost centres, and maximizes profit streams.
To get people to buy the stock. To show that the company is profitable and is leveraging all their assets.
Reddit has expectations of what moderators are to do, and has expectations of what they are not to do, and will remove them from roles if they fail to meet those expectations. That set of expectations would make them employees if compensated.
As for liability, the Ninth Circuit in Mavrix v LiveJournal held that if an agent of a user-content-hosting ISP (social media) has the means and opportunity to moderate, they also have the means and opportunity to interdict reasonably known copyright violations, and failure to act on those would jeopardise their DMCA Safe Harbour.
And there’s a lot of registered copyright holders that will 100% line up to be a creditor on statutory damages.
Their willingness to exempt screen reader / accessibility capable or accessibility focused third party apps from API pricing is good faith IMO.
So the NSFW changes seem to be prompted by regulatory threats & Reddit getting the approaches covered, & this also seems to confirm that the API shutdown for many third party apps is because the API was a golden goose for those developers, laying golden eggs - both in user content & in giving those app developers the opportunity to run their own adverts alongside reddit content.
Their fight with ad blocking is the same Cold War every other social media site has. If they’re serving ads off of distinctly named infrastructure, or even distinctly subnetted or IP-addressed infrastructure, an adblocking router config will kill them no matter, & there’d be people writing those and distributing them. Their only hope would be to serve ads inline with content, to defeat those. Which … they already do, I think? I dunno. It would be how they’d serve adverts to Apollo users and RiF users. I think the biggest adblocking issue they have is people on desktop chrome & Firefox. Who already aren’t using the API.
They didn’t lock old.reddit out of new features; it’s a really unwieldy codebase, and making changes to old,reddit is like shaking a wooden water tower. It holds up the water tank as long as it’s a static load, not dynamic. I’ve had to read / maintain / debug source code in my career - and I’ve read the old open sourced Reddit code, and it is … well, it’s not designed for building up and out. It’s not even designed for maintaining over time. It was designed to get a message board running with occasional weekly downtimes, and a lot of “you broke reddit” and a bunch of RSS feeds and API endpoints, and no view to end user experience. It was built with the same mindset as building windows 3.1. Coding some of the features would be like backporting their support code to windows 3.1 - but not as libraries, as device drivers.