How did it come to this, Reddit?

In April, when the message-board megasite announced that it would begin charging for access to its API, it was not a huge story. The idea seemed to be that Reddit didn’t want companies training generative AI algorithms to have free access to its firehose of information-rich conversations between human beings, and that seemed fair enough.

But when it turned out that the new fees would also impact third-party apps for accessing Reddit, such as Christian Selig’s beloved Apollo—and apparently make them financially unsustainable—many of the site’s moderators were incensed. And a critical mass protested by shutting down their “subreddit” forums starting on June 12. As I write, the website Reddark, set up to track the protest, says that more than 3,000 subreddits remain closed.

There are numerous sides to this controversy, all unfortunate. I don’t begrudge Reddit its efforts to make money, or at least lose less of it. (Eighteen years into its history and stumbling toward an IPO, the company remains unprofitable.) But if Selig’s much-quoted figure of $20 million a year in API charges to keep Apollo running is accurate, the shift from free access to paid seems designed to kill third-party services, not make them pay. And exactly which aspect of Elon Musk’s management of Twitter is Reddit CEO Steve Huffman talking about when he cites Musk as a role model for how to run an internet platform?

The aspect of the melodrama I find most painful is the fissure it’s widened between Reddit management and Reddit moderators, whose collaboration has always been fraught. It goes beyond the specifics of this debate: In an interview with NBC News’s David Ingram, Huffman compared the site’s unpaid volunteers to “landed gentry” and said they left Reddit a less democratic place. Those aren’t the words of someone trying to patch up the relationship.

I’m not arguing that moderators are always right about everything. They can be erratic and unreasonable, and some of them actively make the internet worse. But most of the ones at Reddit—and others who do similar work at Wikipedia, Facebook Groups, and elsewhere—perform an outsize, heroic role in preserving the digital world’s humanity. That’s something to cherish, especially as we face the prospect of a surging sea of AI-generated chum overwhelming the entire net.

As an element of online community, users becoming moderators dates back at least to the early days of CompuServe and The Source, which pioneered consumer dial-up information services starting in 1979. Features such as message boards were managed by members, who took the responsibility seriously even though there was little or no money in it. Creating an environment that brought kindred spirits together was reward enough.

Fast-forward to this century. Social networking—our equivalent of CompuServe and Source forums—is one of the internet’s principal draws. But tech companies are fixated on scale, not a human touch. Though they sometimes hire people to deal with the worst behavior on their services, they’d much prefer to automate their way out of problems. The results are rarely satisfying, and at their worst—I’m looking at you, Twitter—they’re toxic. (In 2021, Twitter did introduce a Communities feature that lets anyone create and moderate topic-specific gatherings on the platform, but it was too late and too half-hearted to have any impact.)

Here and there, despite everything, moderation still flourishes. Over on Facebook, many of the users who create and run groups really put their hearts into it. They take an active hand in keeping the conversation civil, on topic, and engaging, showing dedication that’s especially admirable given hurdles, such as a spam infestation, that Meta has sometimes seemed wholly disinterested in fighting. There are also glimmers of something similar to old-fashioned moderation on decentralized platforms such as Mastodon, which lets anyone set up a server and establish ground rules for using it. Those who do so feel a sense of ownership because they do own their little piece of the service.

My own most significant effort as a moderator was helping to run a forum about comics and animation on BIX, Byte magazine’s online service. BIX folded in 2001, so you can tell that was long ago. But my fellow moderators and I cultivated conversation, made tough decisions when members misbehaved, formed lasting friendships, and—most of all—built something that a meaningful number of people loved. It’s still an accomplishment I treasure. I hope those doing the work today, on Reddit and beyond, take similar satisfaction—even if they rarely get much attention, except when things go wrong.