Reddit CEO likens moderators to ‘landed gentry’ amidst ongoing blackout.

A Co-Founder’s Disconnect: Reddit CEO Disses Moderators Amidst Blackout

A co-founder of Reddit, which draws more than 50 million readers every day, is proving he doesn’t really get his own site.

The site is a brilliant bit of social engineering — enlist regular people with a passion, pay them nothing, and have them moderate subreddits that draw millions of other passionate readers. But Reddit CEO Steve Huffman dissed them hard last week, comparing them to wealthy aristocracy and threatening to figure out a way to oust them with little discourse.

“If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders,” Huffman told NBC, The Washington Post reported. “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”

Huffman doesn’t get it. Moderators made more than 9,000 subreddits inaccessible last week to protest Reddit’s plan to charge third-party apps millions of dollars to access its data. The plan prompted popular third-party apps such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync to say they’ll have to shut down on July 1.

Moderators made thousands of subreddits private, cutting off access to general users. But while the protest was set to run for 48 hours, some moderators now say they’ll keep their subreddits dark until the whole mess is sorted out.

Last Monday, Huffman told employees in an internal memo that the blackout “will pass” like “all blowups on Reddit,” the Verge reported.

“There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well,” the memo read. “We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.”

After the report that Huffman would seek to depose moderators, cooler heads prevailed, and Reddit walked it all back. Reddit spokesman Tim Rathschmidt told The Post that the comment was taken out of context and that “Steve did not confirm we are moving in this direction.”

“We are not removing moderators who protest, nor are we taking over subreddits for participating in the blackout,” he said, adding, “Redditors want to reddit.”

But the moderators are digging in. A group that organized the blackout on the r/ModCoord subreddit said in a statement that Huffman’s comments show Reddit’s communication about the plan to charge for data “has been poor from the very beginning.”

“They have attempted to gaslight us that they want to keep third-party apps while they set prices and timelines no developer can meet. The blowback that is happening now is largely because Reddit launched this drastic change with only 30 days notice,” Reddit user BuckRowdy, a moderator of the subreddit coordinating the protest, wrote on Thursday. “We continue to ask Reddit to place these changes on pause and explore a real path forward that strikes a balance that is best for the widest range of Reddit users.”

In another tin-ear moment, Huffman has claimed Reddit is not profitable. “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use,” Huffman said in an “ask me anything” post earlier this month.

“We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive,” Huffman wrote.

But Reddit has been valued at $10 billion and hauled in $1 billion in fundraising in August 2021.

We’re assuming that Huffman understands that part of Reddit.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent for a national newspaper. He was also the a.m. editor of the Drudge Report for four years. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.