Reddit Moderators Do Over $3.4 Million in Free Labor Every Year
It’s one good reason the CEO should listen to their protest
So, you’ve heard about the moderator protest at Reddit?
If you haven’t, here’s the tl;dr recap:
For years now, many in the Reddit community have used third-party mobile apps — like Apollo — to read and post to Reddit. That’s partly because Reddit for a long time didn’t have its own app. It’s also because Reddit made it cheap to develop a third-party app. Reddit’s API (the gateway that lets third-party apps post data to Reddit) was free. So Apollo could do its thing without incurring a lot of data costs.
That changed quickly in recent months, when Reddit executives announced they were adding new charges to their API.
Why? Well, as CEO Steve Huffman explained, Reddit needs to pursue profitability; the firm has lived off investment for a long while, so it needs more revenue streams. And hey: Fair enough! Huffman also wanted some way of getting revenue from AI firms like OpenAI/Microsoft and Google, which have been scraping Reddit’s posts to train their AI models. Again, fair enough.
The problem is, Reddit announced that these new fees for using the API would take effect … on July 1.
