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2015-07-16 13:37:06
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.