What the hell's going on at Reddit?
Is Reddit the canary in the AI coal mine?
We need to talk about Reddit.
That might sound like the unwelcome follow-up to Lionel Shriver’s 2003 best-seller about a school shooter, but that’s no bad thing. After all, Reddit is seen as one of the darker corners of the mainstream internet: ground zero for conspiracy theories, anti-establishment insurrection and the culture wars.
It’s also a fairly benign, user-focused social media site. The premise, and I’ll explain this as though this is your first day on t’internet, is simple: users submit content to a variety of “sub-Reddits” organised according to interests (so you might join r/GameOfThrones or r/ManchesterUnited or r/CelebrityFeet). These submissions can be original text, images or video, or links to outside sites. Fellow Redditors can then respond to submissions by commenting, upvoting or down-voting. As a result, top posts across all subs might make it to the front page of Reddit. And given that Reddit’s tagline has always been “the front page of the internet” that’s no small thing.
Reddit is in the news at the moment because of changes to the pricing of its API. The API (Application Programming Interface) is the mechanism by which sites can be cracked open by independent users, and utilised for third party purposes. For Reddit, the big beasts who are under threat are places like Apollo, Sync, Relay and Riff. Essentially these are apps that re-organise Reddit in a way that is intended to improve the user experience and provide features not baked into the original product. Think about, if you must, the way that TweetDeck (which was actually purchased by Twitter itself, in 2011) offered a bunch of features that the Twitter app itself didn’t offer. They did that by interfacing with the Twitter API, in a way that made the two services closely entangled.
The big issue with Reddit is one that is rarely put into plain language, but I’ll do that: it looks like shit. From a UX perspective, it is way behind basically any website of its size. To the modern eye, used to flowing, infinitely-scrollable, sleekly designed homepages, Reddit.com feels like a throwback. It looks like it was intended to be loadable on the slowest dial-up internet that 1999 could offer. And it has always been reliant on the openness of its API to provide services that would otherwise be missed. Indeed, the current incarnation of the Reddit app that you use on your phone, arose from the acquisition of Alien Blue, a third-party app that enabled Reddit users to have a mobile version of the site (there was no native iOS app until 2014 – the year that Gangnam Style reached 2bn views on YouTube).
Now there are serious concerns within the Reddit hierarchy about the way their API could be used to train LLMs (Large Language Models) from companies like Google and Microsoft, but there’s also, inevitably, a belt-tightening element. Twitter, under Elon Musk, has also restricted access to APIs and introduced an aggressive pricing plan. If there’s a little milk to squeeze from the margins, Big Tech is going to be doing it in the current marketplace. There’s also the, not inconsiderable, fact that many of the third-party apps utilising the Reddit API strip the site of its advertising content, which means that Reddit users are being offered an ad-free version of a site whose only monetisation option is hosting advertising. Hmm.
So that’s the confusing position that Reddit finds itself in. For my part, I’m pretty ambivalent. I am a light Reddit user (it’s probably third on my social media list, after Twitter and Instagram) but the sort of “nerd” who only uses the core Reddit site and app. I think – as I stated above – that it looks like shit, but that’s part of its charm. It feels far less corporate than the other ultra-successful social media platforms of that period. All the same, if you’ve had an open API for the duration of your existence, and have chronically failed to invest in developing your core product, it’s quite rogue to try and overnight undo that status quo.
Which might explain why Reddit has gone into revolt. Moderators of many of its subs (the great unpaid labourers of the internet age) locked a huge percentage of Reddit’s communities last week, or labelled them open to NSFW, leading to a flood of pornography. The statement they were making was simple: Reddit is a service that is run on user submitted and generated content. It also uses its customer base for content moderation, allowing it to be run in an extremely lean way (at present it has around 2,000 employees – Meta, by way of contrast, has over 77,000). To those users, this seems like another money grab by a company that has always profited from its committed users.
Last week Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, addressed the revolt by issuing a statement reaffirming their commitment to enacting the changes. But he also observed that “the only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.” This is the opportunity, and the danger, for Reddit: in order to combat rebellion within the ranks, they will need to start providing many of the tools that were previously offered to them, for free, by third-party developers. The balance between these costs and the revenue generated by API-access sales (and consolidating users on the core app) is a delicate one.
But Reddit will clearly continue to position this conflict as something different to Greedy Reddit Executives vs Hard-working Loyal Unpaid Reddit Moderators. From a PR perspective, the simplest spin would be: Reddit vs AI.
The Verge referred to the text generated on Reddit as “robot food” for LLMs. This is a good line but relies upon a slight cognitive dissonance. After all, Reddit has always been something of a robot itself. Well, not a robot – but a vast, swarming ecosystem of individual users who act as one, rapacious entity. Think about the way a murmuration of starlings moves through the air, or a shoal of anchovies twists and twirls, gobbling up plankton. Reddit’s input function was users (predominantly) stealing or referring to content from elsewhere on the internet, not unlike an LLM. The fact that publishers’ relationships with the internet’s pre-eminent aggregator were largely positive is down to the fact they were always a generous linker (unlike, say, Google News, which had to go to court to defend its right to publish standfirsts along with headlines). But original content was always secondary to this ability to digest the web. It was, after all, the front page of the internet.
(It’s also worth noting that Reddit has become a key journalism tool. BuzzFeed now directly credits a large portion of its articles as directly harvested from Reddit communities, but many other publications use Reddit as an ideas-generator or an investigative tool and don’t credit that. In short, the relationship between publishers and Reddit is even more snarled up and knotty that it seems on the surface.)
I’ve written in the past about how I cannot see a way that AI, without a creative spark, is capable of creating something non-plagiaristic. I stand by that. I wouldn’t level the same criticism at Reddit – not least because it also has a sense of community better and more distinctive than any other mainstream website – but equally it hardly feels like the fairest challenge to the latest insurgents. LLMs don’t have a lot of friends – outside of their owners – and Reddit is but the latest site to try and starve the robots.
A pressing question here seems to be: who owns Reddit? It’s still a private company, so less easy to find a comprehensive answer here. The majority shareholder is Advance Publications, who also own Condé Nast (publisher of Vogue, The New Yorker, Wired etc) as well as an 8% stake in Warner Bros Discovery. The second largest institutional shareholder is Tencent, a Chinese company and the world’s largest video games investor, which owns 5%. Reddit’s two surviving founders – Huffman and Alexis Ohanian – own something, I presume. And then there have been investors like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Y Combinator and Fidelity. Thiel has been working on AI projects with his company Palantir, a data crunching goliath, but has always seemed quite sceptical about the long-term risk-benefit analysis for AI. Similarly, Andreessen, one of the most trusted investors in Silicon Valley, hasn’t seem to join the AI goldrush (his primary stockholdings include Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest – i.e. old school social media).
This isn’t really me trying to imply that there is some grand plan amongst Reddit owners to defeat AI by cutting of robot food and robot water and robot shelter and robot companionship. But this is also clearly a symptom of the split in Big Tech between investors who are keen to cash-in, quickly, on the move towards AI integration, and those who are taking a longer-term view. It is the fish and the rod all over again (and possibly in reverse). Give your shareholders a fish and you feed them for a day. The real danger is that we’ve given the fish a rod too, and soon enough the shareholders will be going hungry, while the fish drain the oceans of other fish using the rod we gave it.
I apologise if that’s a confusing image. But AI is confusing, and the public, policy and professional response to it is also confusing. Every day, it feels like extremely long-term decisions are being made extremely quickly. The history of humanity is also the history of its failure to make long-term decisions – whether that’s, you know, not burning loads of carbon or, more mundanely, stalling on building a second high-speed rail line in the UK – and whether the decisions being made today on AI are existential doesn’t really matter. We may never be under the yoke of ChatGPT or Bard, but the shape of life will undoubtedly change. The can is being kicked down the road by responses like Reddit’s API changes, but such small measures are not sustainable. Reddit might not cave to the demands of its user-base but, whether it likes it or not, the service will continue to be a pawn in the most complicated game on earth.
I’m thinking a lot more at the moment about the future of Future Proof. I’ve been writing this newsletter every week for the past year and a bit, as well as my blogs on Medium, and have no plans to stop. But I want to reach new audiences, as well as providing for existing subscribers. I have the notion that maybe – given my line of work – I should be spinning more of this off into a podcast format. I have a pretty clear idea of where I want to go with that: if you’re remotely interested in hearing what I’m thinking, drop me a line to nick@podotpods.com