How Did Moderators Decide to Take Subreddits Private?.What Does It Mean to “Go Dark,” “Go Private,” or “Black Out” and is This A New Thing?.How Do You Become a Moderator on Reddit?.I hope this post is useful to journalists writing about the Reddit blackout, and I hope that Reddit moderators read this too, so you can tell me what I am getting right, what I’m misunderstanding, and what conversations I’m missing. I’ve resisted commenting, because we often want easy answers in the heat of the moment: will Reddit survive, what do I think about Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, are moderators are exploited labor, a “product being sold” to advertisers? In my research this summer, I’m trying to go beyond these important, near-term questions to understand the work that Reddit moderators do and how they see it.Īlthough it’s too early to share my results, I *can* share some of what I’ve found. This story was covered widely in the press last weekend, with the MediaCloud project tracking 92 articles in the mainstream media and 51 in its “tech blogs” dataset.Īs a PhD candidate spending my summer researching the work of moderators on Reddit, I’ve been asked repeatedly by journalists to share my results.
Reddit’s management responded within hours, apparently after substantive negotiations with moderators, and promised to meet those demands. What may not have started as a protest quickly became one, with many moderators complaining that the company needed to offer better communication and better tools to its volunteer moderators. Last Thursday and Friday, moderators of many of Reddit’s most popular discussion groups “blacked out” their subreddits, preventing access to parts of the site by Reddit subscribers and cutting off some of the company’s advertising revenue for half a day.