The Reddit Thing, pt 1 — Touched with Fire Media

I’ve been trying to bring myself to write about the Reddit Thing for a while, but I keep declining to because (A) I’m not an expert and I’m not sure anybody cares about my amateur analysis, and (B) I’ve always been more comfortable in a quasi-narrative mode, at least one in which the I exists and I’m not performing complex analysis without constant reference to my own experience.* I’ve been trying to figure out how to filter the Reddit thing through that mode of expression, and it’s been hard. Part of the problem is, I think, that it would take a lot of work, and now that I’ve reengaged on the novel (I’ve solved it for real this time you guys!), most of my auxiliary attention is directed to radio and I have difficulty engaging with the kind of 10,000-word think piece it would probably have to be to meet the standards I’ve set for myself.

*That said, you may have noticed that I shy away from self-revelation and that my personality is extant almost entirely in the prose and not at all in the actions of the I in any given story I tell. You might expect this to be a trick glommed from DFW, who used to call it his “all-seeing eye thing” (if memory serves — don’t quote me quoting him on that), but this is more a matter of our having independently figured out a way to do memoir without ever, ever having to be confessional.

So I’m going to try to allow myself to be lazy, and at the same time try to keep this entry under 2000 words, which may involve writing this over the course of a few days and so on. I’m going to start by trying to do a little summary of “the Reddit Thing”, which may be redundant for some, and then get into how I’ve engaged with it and what I think it means. If you prefer auditory storytelling to written, try this episode of Reply All, in which Alex & PJ do a top-notch edition of their regular segment “Yes, Yes, No” on what they call “the Reddit implosion”.

Here’s my version. Reddit, if you don’t know, is a website. It’s a website on which almost all of the content is in one way or another generated by users. These users — I’m one of them — submit weblinks to the site, and the site provides a space, or “thread”, for discussion of each link. Some huge percentage of the links consist of memes and photographs. I don’t know how many, but my guess would be well over half. But they’re not all memes and photographs. Some are articles, videos, individual tweets. And some are self-posts: they link to nothing, but contain words from the user who submits them, sometimes brief and pithy, sometimes long and involved. Reddit has hundreds of millions of users — this article by Sam Thielman of The Guardian estimates 164 million, which is on the low end of what I’ve seen — and, as a result, this could get very chaotic. How does one sift through the chaos to see what’s good, what’s important, and what one wants to see?

There are two main methods: the subreddit, and the upvote. The upvote you don’t have to worry about, at least for now. What we’re going to focus on right now is the subreddit. A subreddit is a section of Reddit dedicated to a single subject. They’re usually easily found by adding /r/whatyourelookingfor to the end of Reddit’s URL, viz, reddit.com/r/community will take you to a subreddit dedicated entirely to the TV show Community.** They can also be found through the site’s search function, though not as easily as one might like — which points to a big problem that Reddit has, one we’ll get to later, possibly tomorrow.

**Note about this: subs dedicated to TV shows, especially cartoons, tend to consist of very, very bad content — either photographs of people cosplaying as characters, or screencaps of popular scenes. It took me a long time to figure this out, and this truth often results in alternate subreddits that are set up for actual, substantive discussion of the show. Community in particular has a really bad sub, and those who wanted to discuss episodes without recourse to comments consisting of “squeeeeee!!!!! i lurve jeff n annie!!!!!” had to set up an alternate one, called /r/studyroomf.

One of the ways in which the site’s content is user-generated is that these subreddits are (A) created and (B) maintained by volunteer moderators, who can do pretty much whatever the hell they want with them. And so it is that /r/community is about a TV show and not about, you know, community organizing or whatever. Reddit has, over the years, been extremely hands-off about all things to do with moderation. Create a sub called /r/conspiracy? It can be full of nasty, often anti-semitic conspiracy theories. Create one called /r/fatpeoplehate? It’s fine if it’s full of the nastiest comments you can imagine about fat people. But, by the same token, if you create one called /r/stormfront, it can be about literal storm fronts, and not a haven for the evil, neonazi denizens of the website stormfront dot org. (I refuse to provide those scumbags a link.)

This is a pretty simplistic explanation, but those subreddits are filled with links to articles and photos and such, and in threads dedicated to those links, people communicate. Sometimes it’s great. Sometimes, it’s truly awful. The awful — the racist, the abusive, the mean and ugly — tend to gain the most attention in the media, because they’re the most exciting. But the truth is, in my experience, that most of Reddit is fairly benign, if not particularly beautiful. Much like the world.

My usual move here would be to slide into analysis — of Reddit’s cultures and statistics. But “the Reddit Thing” needs to be summarized up top a little more. Because a description of what Reddit is isn’t The Reddit Thing. The Reddit Thing has been happening in the last few months. And it’s been reaching a head in the last few weeks.

It started all the way back in October 2012, which doesn’t really feel that long ago to me but in internet-time is a generation, when a Reddit user who went by the name u/violentacrez was doxxed† by Gawker. He wasn’t a particularly cool dude, on the whole: Michael Brutsch (as it turned out his name was) spent a lot of his time on Reddit posting racist content, and / or links to photographs pubescent girls, to a subreddit called /r/jailbait. This is too complicated to go into in depth, but the upshot was that /r/jailbait, along with /u/violentacrez, got banned. This was a lot of regular people’s introduction to Reddit, but to regular users it seemed to stink of hypocrisy. /r/jailbait certainly wasn’t the only objectionable subreddit, and /u/violentacrez was far from the site’s only scummy user.

†”doxxing” is the practice of giving out the real world name, and sometimes contact info, of a theoretically anonymous online user

The story tumbles through the next few years. Reddit remains extremely hands-off with its mods and users, for the most part. There were other incidents, but the next one I remember is the release of a bunch of hacked celebrity photographs, dubbed, charmingly, The Fappening, which happened last year. Despite what you might have heard, Reddit was not in fact the epicenter of these leaks, but they rapidly spread there. When publicity got bad, the Reddit admins — the paid people who worked there, who had banned /r/jailbait — started banning subreddits dedicated to the leaks. Again, a lot of regular users scented hypocrisy — violent and racist subreddits remained, but the ones that famous people objected to got nixed. And let’s be honest, there was some truth to this accusation. The fact that you could post videos of people jumping off buildings all day with impunity, but got in trouble as soon as CNN and Gawker noticed what you were up to, didn’t look very good.

But it was in 2015 that things began to blow up. In the same way that one can read World War I and World War II as part of the same long war, the recent Reddit unrest really begins with a different incident that took place back on June 10, when Reddit admins, including interim CEO Ellen Pao and founder and board chairman Alexis Ohanian, moved to ban a very small number of very virulent subreddits that, in their estimation, existed at least in part to perform acts of harrassment that crossed even the very dim and far-afield lines that Reddit had drawn.†† The most popular of these was the aforementioned /r/fatpeoplehate. That community had 150,000 or so users — huge, by one measure; but tiny, when you think about the fact that the site had more than 100 times that many users in total. If you think about any massive community — say, the United States of America — what are the odds that 1% of it will hold ugly, virulent views? Pretty much 100%, wouldn’t you say? The /r/fatpeoplehate crowd was relatively small. But it erupted, and a lot of people who weren’t a part of that community got angry, too. It was the hypocrisy again — but it was also that people had for years come to see Reddit as a bastion of free speech in a world increasingly overrun by PC bullshit. Whether or not the people who made Reddit in the first place had intended for it to be that, that’s what some of its users had come to view it as. Banning controversial subreddits violated this tenet of Reddit’s user-generated philosophy.

†† Just so we get this out there, my view is that these bans were right, righteous, and late in coming. But we’ll get to that another time.

So, that was unpopular. But The Reddit Thing didn’t really happen until a few days ago, when a Reddit employee named Victoria Taylor was fired, and the community revolted.

What? Why?

Well, that Reply All episode will explain this pretty well, but here’s what I have to say about it: Victoria was the only vector by which a huge proportion of the site’s moderators — the all-volunteer teams of people who maintain those subreddits — could effectively communicate with the admins. The hands-off policy that allowed the anything goes atmosphere also meant that the actual people who ran Reddit were all but inaccessible to the users. Victoria, on the other hand, was instrumental in setting up Reddit’s most popular feature, the AMA. Without getting into the weeds, the AMA (it stands for “ask me anything”) allows for people — anybody from a guy who hasn’t pooped in weeks to the Leader of the Free World — to go in front of Reddit’s userbase and answer user-posed questions. Not all AMAs needed Victoria’s help (the no-poop guy did his on his own, before she was hired), but when celebrities, especially aging Boomer celebrities who weren’t very web-savvy, showed, she was often instrumental. These AMAs sustained traffic to many, many of Reddit’s subreddits, but especially one of its most popular /r/IAmA, which has nearly 9 million subscribers. Unlike other Reddit admins, Victoria actually interacted with the site's userbase, and made its moderators' lives easier.

Victoria was fired for reasons that, with good reason, have not been revealed to the world at large. Because Reddit isn’t a very big company, the reasons were probably not entirely structural — ie, some of it may have been about personalities. But nobody in the community was warned, and when she was let go, it left a lot of people holding the bag, including the mods of several subreddits who had AMAs set up that they had no way of conducting. The Reddit mods got, to quote Community creator Dan Harmon, dirt roaded.

Let’s be clear here: the way Taylor was dismissed was a total clusterfuck, the kind of catastrophic series of decisions that leads to PR nightmares everywhere. Because they were disengaged from the users, her bosses had no idea how important she was to them. I have no idea whether she deserved to be let go — maybe she did — but at the very least there should have been a period of transition, during which both Taylor and the community were allowed to acclimate to the new normal, and find adequate workarounds. That’s just Firing People 101. That didn’t happen.

The reaction of the Reddit mods was kind of astounding. And then, like all good things in the Internet Age, it got coopted.

Moderators — those volunteers running the subreddits — started doing the one thing they felt they could do to express their displeasure: they set their subreddits to “private”, meaning that their subscribers couldn’t see them.ª This happened with several of the biggest subreddits on the site, including /r/IAmA. The Reddit Thing had begun.

ª For the record, I moderate a subreddit, though for privacy reasons I’m not going to reveal what it is here. It’s pretty small. We didn’t go private at any point.

The complaints mushroomed, as mods began — rightly — to raise objections to the rat’s nest of shitty code and bad tools that comprised Reddit’s moderation package. Reddit’s higher ups, faced with a massively popular website whose most massively popular pages were nonfunctional, began to scramble. Ellen Pao, who was the interim CEO, issued a statement that many deemed inadequate, full of corporate doublespeak. So did Alexis Ohanian, chairman of the board and co-founder of Reddit. Only after many, many assurances that mod tools would be improved and life made easier for moderators, subreddits began re-opening.

But it was kind of too late. Because this is the internet — and because this is Reddit, in ways we’ll get into over the next, oh my God, is it going to be a week of posts? — the revolt had become about something else. It had become, improbably — totally wrongly, in my view — a referendum on interim CEO Ellen Pao.

A certain subsection of Reddit users had had it in for Pao ever since the /r/fatpeoplehate ban. Probably since before. Again, the reasons — almost all of them awful — are something we’ll engage with at a later date. But the reaction now was swift, and it was ugly. Some people began referring to Pao as “Chairman Pao”, in an insulting and probably racist reference to the former Communist dictator of China. Her picture turned up on a subreddit called /r/punchablefaces. She says — and I believe — that she began to receive terrible harrassment from users. Last week, she quit. Reddit re-hired co-founder Steve Huffman as its CEO, in what strikes me as both a wise PR move and something of a sop to its users.

I’m not going to go a hell of a lot farther with this much-too-long blog entry, but let me give you a precis of my feelings on this matter: it seems painfully obvious to me that the way Pao was treated was viciously sexist, openly racist, and totally reprehensible. I also think that The Reddit Thing represents a colossal fuckup on the part of Reddit’s higher ups, including Pao, though it’s impossible to tell from the outside who is responsible for what. And there’s a lot of backstory to that shit. But that’s for another day.