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Ellen Pao has left the room, but the firm still has to keep a volunteer staff
happy while tempering its approach to free speech
Jul 14th 2015
REDDIT is either a robust bastion of American-style free speech, pushing the
envelope in all directions in the interest of exploring difficult ideas, or it
is a bottomless cesspool, depending on whom one asks. It could be a bit of
both. But unless changes are made, the latter could suck the former into its
murky depths.
Ellen Pao, its boss, resigned on July 10th under what has been described as
mutual agreement. She said that she disagreed with the board s vision, which
called for faster growth than she thought was realistic. But it would have been
hard to miss that she had become an object of hatred for many of Reddit s
users. They had been clamouring for her resignation since July 2nd, when
Victoria Taylor, who had headed its extremely popular Ask Me Anything (/r/iAMA)
interview section, was sacked. Some of them exploded in a mixture of sexist and
racist jubilation when her dismissal was announced.
Reddit calls itself the internet s front page. It is better understood as the
successor to Usenet, a clutch of discussion groups born of an earlier internet,
when the network was mostly used by academics. It also resembles a collage
pasted to the door of a student s dorm room a reflection of its demographics.
Like Usenet before it, Reddit is very young and male. A survey conducted in
2013 by the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank, found that whereas 6% of all
American internet users had visited Reddit, 15% of all men aged 18 to 29 used
it. They were joined by only 5% of women their age, and by 8% of men aged 30 to
49. By contrast, a Pew study found that 71% of all Americans online visited
Facebook in 2014; 42% of American women frequent Pinterest.
Reddit s fundamental problem is its reliance on unpaid labour, a difficulty
shared with other community-run sites like Wikipedia. But for Reddit, this is
complicated by its for-profit status. Reddit has roughly 70 paid staff, who
handle the site's infrastructure. An estimated 20,000 volunteer moderators help
manage over 9,000 active boards, which play host to 164m unique users a month,
by the firm's most recent count. The subreddits are created around topics of
intense interest, whether for good or ill. Reddit has long relied on users'
ability to upvote and downvote given posts to help police the site, but the
wisdom of crowds does not always keep objectionable content buried. Moderators
have generally helped to keep the site functioning. A plan to distribute $5m in
shares to these redditors at its October valuation has yet to be firmed up.
Since Ms Pao s departure, both of Reddit s founders have returned to manage the
firm. They regard the site as a self-governing sucessor to Usenet and its
tradition of (nearly) unfettered speech. The firm is majority-owned by Advance
Publications, which also owns Cond Nast, a giant media group. It attracted
$50m in new investment last October from top-tier Silicon Valley venture
capitalists and celebrities such as Jared Leto, a singer, and Snoop Dogg, a
rapper.
After Ms Taylor left, ad hoc protests by angry moderators took sections of
Reddit down for days. Many of the moderators had supported her, and many others
said they were protesting a general lack of communication from the company.
They would have appreciated advance notice of her dismissal, they suggested,
and also better tools to do their "jobs". Redditors have long sought site-based
controls to help them block persistent trolls (who register an endless series
of disposable accounts to post abuse and nonsense). They also complain of the
inordinate time it takes to shut down raids , in which the participants of one
subreddit bombard another usually due to some perceived slight, to make an
ideological point or just for the lulz that is, malicious glee at the
discomfort of others.
Beyond the valley of the dudes
For years, Reddit allowed a board that hosted images that strayed close to the
legal definition of child pornography, which was only closed in 2011. A
quasi-successor focused on non-consensually posted images of women, /r/
Creepshots, was banned in late 2012 after an expos by Gawker, a magazine, of
violentacrez, a popular redditor involved in both boards. Other offensive
boards were removed in subsequent years, all for behaviour, not ideas , as Ms
Pao stated recently. They had engaged in the manipulation of Reddit; harassment
of individuals outside of the boards; or, in the case of /r/TheFappening, the
posting of stolen nude images of celebrities. One of Ms Pao s last moves, on
June 10th, was to revise the definition of appropriate behaviour and
effectively ban several more boards, including /r/fatpeoplehate.
Thus Reddit s great contradictions: it is a for-profit operation with investors
to satisfy, but which relies on volunteers giving their time free of charge.
Reddit would no doubt prefer to leave the contradiction unresolved, and to
accept hate speech as the unavoidable cost to being a haven for free
expression. But investors, and the great mass of typical users, may demand
something different.