The Reddit moderator rebellion earlier this year doesn’t seem to have fazed CEO Steve Huffman, who says that AI moderation is part of the solution.
Huffman says that he stands by the company’s decision to charge for API access despite the fact that it was massively unpopular, and led to the demise of the leading Reddit app, Apollo …
The Reddit moderator rebellion
Reddit got itself into a mess when it decided to charge unrealistic amounts for access to the API that powered third-party (former) apps like Apollo. That resulted in wide-scale protests by moderators and users alike, with the company threatening them in response.
One specific concern was the impact on disabled moderators, who had relied on the accessibility features of third-party apps.
While many subreddits went dark, limiting access to existing members, some others came up with a clever alternative: applying a NFSW label, which prevented Reddit from selling ads in them. Subreddits that adopted this tactic include r/HomeKit and r/HomePod.
Reddit staff subsequently removed moderators who declined to end their protests, which led to concerns about the propagation of dangerous advice on the platform.
Huffman unrepentant
In an interview with FastCo, Huffman is unrepentant about the API decision, but says it could have been better communicated.
When I asked Huffman about the moderator blackouts and their aftermath during a recent visit to Reddit headquarters in San Francisco, he defended the company’s decision to limit free access to its API as a necessary measure to foil AI-training freeloaders. “Reddit is an open platform, and we love that,” he told me. “At the same time, we have been taken advantage of by some of the largest companies in the world.”
Huffman does acknowledge missteps on Reddit’s part, especially relating to how it communicated its thinking to users. “The business decision itself, we stand by it, and we stood by it in that moment,” he says. “But I think a lot of how we worked our way through it could have been better.”
AI moderation part of the solution
Huffman says the company plans to introduce AI moderation, though he positions this as an aid to human moderators.
The latitude that individual moderators have to govern their communities means that they can set rules that Huffman describes as “sometimes strict and sometimes esoteric.” Newbies may run afoul of them by accident and have their posts yanked just as they’re trying to join the conversation.
In response, Reddit is currently prototyping an AI-powered feature. called “post guidance.” It’ll flag rule-violating material before it’s ever published: “The new user gets feedback, and the mod doesn’t have to deal with it,” says Huffman.
He’s also on a moderator roadshow, to meet with moderators, “hearing what their challenges are and what’s working well.”
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