Reddit’s boss wants site to grow. Will the community let it?
Steve Huffman, Reddit’s chief executive, positioned the move partly as a way to shore up the company’s finances as it heads toward a long-awaited initial public offering.
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SAN FRANCISCO: For the past 11 years, Bucky has put time and effort into stewarding and guiding dozens of communities on Reddit, the sprawling internet message board.
As a “moderator” of roughly 80 different topic-based forums, Bucky — who goes by “BuckRowdy” on Reddit and who asked that his full name not be used to prevent online harassment — and others like him are essential to growing and maintaining the social media site, which is one of the internet’s biggest destinations for online discussion.
Until two weeks ago, when Bucky revolted. Reddit had just introduced changes that sharply increased its fees for independent developers who build apps using the company’s data. Steve Huffman, Reddit’s chief executive, positioned the move partly as a way to shore up the company’s finances as it heads toward a long-awaited initial public offering.
But the changes made it so expensive for some third-party developers that a handful who build tools for Reddit’s moderators had to shut down or significantly alter their apps. In protest, Bucky and other moderators closed down hundreds of forums on the site, effectively making Reddit unusable for many of its 57 million daily visitors. At one point, the site went offline entirely.
“It is really demoralizing,” Bucky said. Being a Reddit moderator and dealing with users is already difficult, he said. “‘I take all this abuse for you, and keep your website clean, and this is how you repay us?’” Reddit, an 18-year-old site that was part of an early wave of social networking, has been trying to “grow up,” Huffman has said in interviews.
What is unclear is whether Reddit’s community will let it. Reddit, which is based in San Francisco, has in recent years tried to turn from a rough-and-tumble internet message board into a full-fledged social media business by adding executives and strengthening its advertising capabilities.
The 2,000-person company — which has repeatedly been mentioned as an IPO candidate — has raised more than $1.3 bn and is valued at more than $10 bn, according to Crunchbase and Reddit’s public statements.
Other social media companies also made similar changes as they grew up. In 2012, Twitter tweaked its rules for how developers could use its data before it went public, outraging users and strangling some popular third-party apps.