![]() This sustained commitment from external developers directly benefits a platform like Reddit in the long run. While these schemes are often not enough to repay the hours spent on a project, it can make the work of maintaining and improving their project more sustainable. Publishing to app stores, offering freemium features, or simply requesting optional donations to support the project are all more accessible means to be compensated. Unlike moderators on Reddit, who have no established way to seek support from the platform or its users, developers can be compensated by a grateful community in a few ways. Unfortunately the communal good doesn’t keep the lights on. The whole open source ecosystem is built around this truth-that people’s passion for the communal good is enough incentive for them to create and innovate. It’s a pattern we see in the other component of Reddit's success: empowering motivated users to build useful tools for your site for free. Fortunately for platforms, users care so deeply for these digital commons that they will volunteer to do it– a convenient source of free labor. When a platform turns its back on the community, it doesn’t end wellĪ better model, which Reddit’s success is built on, is empowering moderators from within a community. It’s grueling work, where one only views the worst the internet has to offer while remaining totally alienated from the community. These mods invisibly compare out-of-context posts to a set of ever-changing and arbitrary rules. The worst version of this is a system of poorly paid workers, typically outsourced, merely reviewing user reports and automated moderation decisions. ![]() Sites are then stuck trying to minimize this labor cost somehow. Automating moderation inevitably blocks legitimate content that wasn’t targeted, and is gamed by bad actors who get around it.Įvery approach comes to the same conclusion-a platform needs workers: Lots of them, around the clock.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.So what can they do? Well, we know what doesn’t work: For sites which need continuous user growth, that is a problem. Any scheme which attempts it is bound to fail. What Reddit got rightĬontent moderation doesn’t work at scale. It supported community-led moderation from volunteer workers, and it embraced developers looking for automated access to the site, through open protocols (e.g. ![]() Reddit maintained openness in two notable ways through its history. 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. 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. Reddit has an admirable record when it comes to defending an open and free internet. Building barriers to access is a war of attrition. 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. After weeks of burning through users’ goodwill, Reddit is facing a moderator strike and an exodus of its most important users. ![]()
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