Opinion Express View on Reddit’s monetisation plans: A digital frontline
For users, the platform’s monetisation plans feel like a betrayal by the very thing they helped build
For users, this feels like a betrayal by the very thing that they helped build. It is, after all, the communities that they have created and nurtured on Reddit that have helped shape the internet of today.
June 22, 2023 06:34 AM IST
First published on: Jun 22, 2023 at 06:34 AM IST
Over the last few days, as Reddit’s users clashed with CEO Steve Huffman over proposed changes to the website, several sections of “the front page of the internet” have gone blank in protest. They were rebelling against plans to monetise the massive amounts of data that is created or shared on Reddit every second, by pricing out the third-party apps who have so far had access to this data for free. For users, especially the moderators who use these apps to keep the subreddits (communities) clean and usable by removing violent and pornographic content, this is a step too far.
Reddit is only the latest frontline of a war that has raged elsewhere on the world wide web, where users have clashed with the companies that run popular platforms, such as Twitter and Meta, over monetisation plans. And the battle here is fierce: Since it was created in 2005, Reddit has grown into one of the most influential websites, drawing over 70 million active users a month. It is a digital behemoth, generating massive amounts of data every second, which the company understandably wants to monetise, so that it can, as Huffman said in a post, be “self-sustaining”.
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For users, this feels like a betrayal by the very thing that they helped build. It is, after all, the communities that they have created and nurtured on Reddit that have helped shape the internet of today. And unlike social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, they have been largely successful in limiting the influence of the manipulative content that has soured user experience elsewhere. In that sense, it remains a throwback to the old internet, driven by communities and interests. Would Reddit be the same if it drove its users away — as Twitter seems to have done by pushing through its monetisation plans, leading to the platform’s so-called “death spiral”? That is a question Huffman must ask himself.
