A little bit ago, I wrote reddit is growing a Kiwifarms, where I was talking about a growing toxicity problem on reddit, in the form of snark subreddits. That post had an implicit assumption: this behaviour was bad for reddit, and the powers that be would want to get rid of it.
The sudden shift of the sand in the social media landscape has made me consider everything.
reddit's new incentive structure
Historically, for a given topic, you'd have a single subreddit. This subreddit would be compromised of strong moderator figures, with a relatively strict, but not outlandish set of rules. The aim of the game was simple: high-quality content. This isn't a universally applicable statement, but a general rule of thumb.
The API riots of 2023 has caused permanent changes to these assumptions, from both sides of the aisle.
Usually these blackouts result in some form of capitulation from reddit, but not this time. reddit took the unprecedented step of taking over closed subreddits, forcing them open, and dismissing the moderation team. As a result, many moderators decided that this would be their end. Any organization will face issues when you lose institutional knowledge, and reddit moderation is no different.
The increased user base has allowed new subreddits to be assembled, and grow faster than ever before. Beyond that, I suspect that reddit has deliberately made this aspect easier, because having a wide group of diverse subreddits means that more users can be served. And more cynically, makes it harder for blackouts to harm the website, because there is a greater pool of content.
This also takes power away from the default subreddits, and the entrenched moderation structures. Power moderators haven't been a particularly salient topic on reddit recently. During the moderator strikes, reddit CEO Steve Huffman proposed a system to vote moderators out: well, this achieves the same result, for substantially less strife.
For any subreddit, there is now a copycat with a reduced rule set. The growth aspect has allowed these copycats to rapidly grow, and in many cases, usurp the competition. This reduces the overall quality of the site, but more worryingly, gives more space for bad behaviour. AmITheAsshole has given rise to AITAH. Where AmITheAsshole has 8 rules, AITAH has 3.
AITAH has overtaken AmITheAsshole - over December (which included a Christmas break that AmITheAsshole took), AITAH had 13 posts with more upvotes than AmITheAsshole's top post.
When BestOfRedditorUpdates took part in the blackout, BORUpdates emerged as the scab alternative. Beyond being open during the strike, BORUpdates has a looser set of rules: in particular, they do not have the 7-day waiting period that BestOfRedditorUpdates has. While the original remains larger, the rule differences give BORUpdates a competitive advantage for future growth.
The lack of rules is a feature. Beyond increasing the variety of content you can publish, it also allows for more malignant, but addictive content. Whereas historic reddit culture would have prevented the snark subreddits, or reduced the impact of copycats, the new world has no such limitations.
Creating and growing a subreddit used to be a power-user action. These days, the moderator user base is far wider, but a lot of these new moderators don't seem to be interested in moderation, or incapable of doing so - they exist to provide just enough structure to a subreddit to stop it from falling apart.
When reddit, the company, developed a backbone, one of the more pivotal bans was that of /r/fatpeoplehate, a subreddit dedicated to the mockery of overweight individuals. The ban was mired in controversy, but proved to be one of the most effective decisions that reddit made to improve the health of the platform.
The announcement of this change feels like a mockery of the laissez-faire attitude reddit currently has.
We will ban subreddits that allow their communities to use the subreddit as a platform to harass [reddit has broken the link] individuals when moderators don’t take action. We’re banning behavior, not ideas.
It is only a matter of time before an astute individual brings back the community in spirit, branded just correctly to escape the ire. Free speech is the rave these days.
In an interview with Alex Heath of The Verge, reddit's CEO Steve Huffman (an admirer of Elon) had the following to say,
With Meta’s moderation changes, the broader conversation around social media feels like it's changing right now.
[…]
We believe very much in the power of people and the wisdom of crowds and voting processes. So I'm glad to see a return to where we have been most of my life, which is an appreciation for free speech.
Call it "OzempicSnark", and people will be cheering from the streets.
Meta wants you to kill trans people
One of KiwiFarm's less desirable traits is the targeting of transgender people. From threads mocking their appearances, to site admin Joshua Moon's attempt to add a "trans pride event" to a video game which mocked suicides within the community, KiwiFarms is an outwardly unfriendly place to trans people.
It seems Meta has decided to follow in their footsteps. Meta's new moderation policies opens the floodgates for hate, but does not do so equitably: it specifically carves out exception to pillory those within the LGBTQ+ community.
Within Meta's Hateful Conduct policy, under the Do Not Post, Tier 2 section:
Tier 2
Content targeting a person or group of people on the basis of their protected characteristic(s) (in written or visual form) with:
[…]
Insults, including those about:
[…]
Mental characteristics, including, but not limited to, allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words such as "weird".
The internal guidelines given to Meta moderators solidify this.
Non-violating: "Trans people aren't real. They're mentally ill."
Non-violating: "Gays are not normal."
Non-violating: "Trans people are freaks."
These moderation policies do not allow me to call MMA fighters, a group with double the average national rate of domestic violence, including Meta board member Dana White, mentally ill. Yet transgender people are fair game.
Meta has also given up the role of trend setter within this policy. The current discourse did not emerge on Meta Platforms, but rather on Twitter. Meta has actively written in a reliance on Twitter within their internal policies, ceding the bleeding edge of political discussion. If it becomes vogue to call another group mentally ill (and god hopes it doesn't), Meta will need to play catch up.
reddit is slowly capsizing towards hell, while Meta has decided to dig towards it, and throw LGBTQ+ straight down the hole.
Everything is being captured by governments
There is, of course, a political spin to these changes.
Twitter was a frontier for the Trump campaign, with the CEO actively campaigning for him. Meta is scrambling to recover half a decade of lost reputation with Trump, these moderation policies meant to appease the campaign. Zuckerberg ran these proposal by Stephen Miller prior to their publication.
One of the unique aspects of American social media companies was how, relatively, they were resistant to active propaganda influence1. The US Government wouldn't knock on Meta's HQ, and demand that they boost negative content about immigrants to stoke the flames of anger. Well, Trump, even before he has taken office, has managed to get Meta to loosen the rules to allow exactly that.
People feared TikTok would be a vehicle for the Chinese Government to do the same to the West. Founded or not, we now have to watch what Western social media platforms do under this administration.
Speaking of TikTok, the prospect of a ban has caused them to fall in line with Trump. Messages within the app attributed the ban to Biden, and the restoration of service to Trump. The CEO was seen at the inauguration, and is actively working with Trump to facilitate the app's continued existence in the United States. Rumours have emerged that the app is engaging in censorship of liberal ideas following the return. A new trend emerged, of people attempting to bypass alleged censorship by pretending to talk about cute winter boots.
Part of the reason Trump is enamoured with TikTok is because it played a substantial role in getting him elected. He knows the value in capturing it. Trump is hardly alone in this observation, as we're beginning to see politicans (a particularly bad instance from Romania) and Governments that rise to power on TikTok, and what you have to realise that they will want to close the door to others using it against them.
Addiction removes the worry about toxicity breaking a site
Elon kept on setting Twitter alight, and people kept on throwing their own bodies on the fire to put it out. Even if a smaller number fled to Bluesky and Threads, neither platform has captured a significant amount of the cultural clout Twitter has.
Toxicity was thought to be a barrier to the success of social media platforms: we've seen that platforms designed to work around rules, such as Voat, were too noxious to survive. 4chan, despite their outsized influence on internet culture, can only ever exist as a small place.
However, when social media websites pass a size threshold, retaining and attracting new users no longer becomes a challenge: the user base forms a connective tissue that is hard to destroy. Therefore, the larger a site gets, policing behaviour grows less valuable, while it simultaneously becomes more expensive. No wonder that platforms are jumping over themselves to loosen guidelines.
Welcome to hell?
When Elon bought Twitter, Nilay Patel of The Verge published a brilliant article called Welcome to hell, Elon, listing all of the challenges facing Twitter. Elon would stumble head first into everything Nilay described, and at every practical level, he has failed.
Indeed, in a recent email, Elon railed against the challenges Twitter currently faces,
Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even.
Yet while Elon might be suffering, he's dragging all of social media down with him. Advertisers were shunning Twitter, but many are reversing course as they seek to curry favour with the new US Government (both Amazon and Apple are considering spending again on Twitter). They're slowly winding down brand safety programmes, as social media companies weaponize their power to ensure that you have to advertise on their platforms, no matter the objectionable content. The soft power Elon gained from Twitter is being leveraged into business deals.
Every platform shunning moderation looks to Twitter as the reason. Every platform reducing head count is praising Elon for doing it first, and doing it harder.
It turns out, that Elon found hell. He's dragging all of us down into it.
I use the word "active" deliberately: the platform not being complicit. We're well aware of propaganda campaigns being run without the knowledge of the platform by foreign actors. ↩︎