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For more than a week now, Reddit moderators have been using the site’s tools to protest proposed business changes. The stalemate reveals how much power the site’s users have accumulated over the years—and just how much the site depends on its moderators’ free labor.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump seems to be afraid, very afraid. Pixar’s talking blobs are becoming more and more unsatisfying. The Titanic sub and the draw of extreme tourism

Not a Worker, Not a Customer

If you’re looking for pictures of John Oliver, for some reason, I have a recommendation for you: The Reddit group r/pics. For the past several days, the r/pics forum, normally populated with food pictures and nature shots, has featured a steady drumbeat of photos of the comedian: John Oliver with his wife. John Oliver’s face Photoshopped onto Spider-Man’s body. John Oliver at a desk. John Oliver on his show. Indeed, the group’s moderators have forbidden users from posting anything besides John Oliver photos.

This is more than just a fun stunt (though it is pretty fun for observers). It is one of the various creative ways that Reddit moderators have used their authority in recent days to register discontent with proposed changes to Reddit’s business.

For the past 10 days, moderators of thousands of Reddit forums have been protesting the company’s plans to charge third parties to run apps on the site. Last week, nearly 9,000 forums went dark for 48 hours. Some forums remain shut down this week, and others are continuing to disrupt the normal flow of posts through the pipelines of the platform.

The trouble began after, earlier this spring, Reddit said it would start charging some other companies for Application Programming Interface (or API) access. In April, the company framed upcoming changes as an effort to ensure that it would be compensated when AI companies scraped the site’s reams of user-generated content. More recently, changes have meant that some beloved apps that make the site easier to use will be forced to shut down because of prohibitive expenses.

Reddit moderators can be forgiven for resenting changes that might make their lives harder. After all, they do a significant amount of work for free. Reddit’s users, especially power users such as moderators, contribute in a big way to the quality and growth of the platform. They lead and nurture (and police) communities that gather around various interests, such as relationships, parenting, plumbing, or weighing in on whether, in a given situation, a poster is the asshole. The relationship between Reddit and its users is unique. The company places outsize responsibility on its volunteer moderators, but as a result, they also have outsize power—which means that their coordinated actions can cause much disruption on the platform.

Moderators are not paid employees of the site. But they are not always customers, either—though Reddit has a premium tier, many users don’t pay to use the platform. Reddit, like many tech companies that provide free products, runs ads (cue the adage “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”). Now, with its new rules, the company is attempting to monetize the content that users—and particularly moderators—have been generating for free.

By protesting the changes, moderators are reminding Reddit just how much the site needs them—and how much the moderators need third-party tools. “Many Reddit moderators rely on third-party apps in order to do their jobs,” my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany, who reports on internet culture for The Atlantic and recently wrote a great book about online communities and fandom, reminded me this morning. “Without them, they’re rightfully concerned that their forums will be flooded with garbage.”

The API debate has exposed broader fault lines on the site, Fraser Raeburn, a historian and Reddit moderator, told me. He said that Reddit should better acknowledge “the role volunteers play within it, in terms of curating content and keeping Reddit a relatively safe and functional part of the internet.” The moderators of his forum, r/AskHistorians, have restricted posts on their forum as part of the protest. Raeburn said he hopes to see Reddit’s leaders engage constructively with questions and clarify how they will handle the disruptions that come from losing some add-ons.

So far, things have been fractious. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told NBC last week that moderators were like “landed gentry,” and suggested that he might make changes that would allow users to vote moderators out. (When I asked Reddit for comment on the recent protests, I was directed to a blog post from last week on the API updates.) For now, moderators remain powerful.

Moderated communities are what have made Reddit distinctive as a platform, and as a result, helped it last. As Kaitlyn pointed out, “Reddit’s model of empowering moderators has given the site a much longer shelf life than I think many would have thought possible 10 years ago.”

It’s not easy for a tech company to make a lot of money and make all of its users happy—especially on a platform that has an open-source ethos. For all the talk among VCs and techies about the power of community, Reddit is demonstrating how fraught the community-based model can be. Especially as Reddit eyes a potential IPO, its corporate interests and user needs may clash.

Raeburn told me he wants this resolved so that he can get back to the reason he’s on the site: talking about history. But for now, he marvels at the way that the site’s structure and culture made this type of action possible. “Reddit had to give us a degree of control over the site because they wanted us to do that work for them,” Raeburn said. “Reddit, probably inadvertently, has created the structure for protest to succeed.”

Related:

Reddit is finally facing its legacy of racism. Inside r/relationships, the unbearably human corner of Reddit

Today’s News

A ProPublica report revealed that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had failed to disclose a 2008 luxury fishing trip with a wealthy conservative donor. Alito wrote an op-ed defending himself in The Wall Street Journal. President Joe Biden referred to Xi Jinping as a dictator at a campaign event in California. The Federal Reserve is likely to raise interest rates in the coming months, despite holding them steady last week.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Readers reflect on how media portrayals can sometimes be at odds with their own life experiences. The Weekly Planet: Car-rental companies are ruining EVs, Saahil Desai writes. Good luck charging your surprise electric rental car.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

Indian dissidents have had it with America praising Modi. How deterrence policies create border chaos We’ve been thinking about the internet all wrong. The future of books is audiobooks.

Culture Break

Read. “The Night Before I Leave Home,” a new poem by Elisa Gonzalez.

“my brother gets out of bed at three, having lain down / only a few hours before, and pulls on his jeans, and stubs his toe / on the bed frame”

Watch. I Think You Should Leave (streaming on Netflix) is a comedy series that reveals the absurdity of office culture.

Play. Try out Caleb’s Inferno, our new print-edition puzzle. It starts easy but gets devilishly hard as you descend into its depths.

Or play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you haven’t already read it, I recommend checking out Kaitlyn’s book Everything I Need I Get From You, which is about the boy band One Direction but also about how fans reshaped the internet. Come for Kaitlyn visiting the spot at the side of the road where Harry Styles threw up; stay for her analysis about how users influenced and created value for major corporations. Also, I now see Beatles fans in a new light.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I asked readers what they experience or observe personally that is most at odds with what they see portrayed in the media.

G. is a 77-year-old woman:

I’m not seeing the real me. I wish the entertainment media would tell the truth about people like me who are my age. I don’t wear (or own) an apron. I’m perfectly comfortable with technology. I taught my 20-year-old granddaughter how to populate a website.

Don’t let looks fool you. I am a sexual person. I love my family but value my privacy and independence. Managing that space is harder than you think. The never-ending display of face lifts and rejuvenation products is a mean-spirited denial of the real beauty of age.

G.Y. offers an analogy:

I am a southerner—from the deepest of the deep South. We southerners don’t hear our own accent, just as my New England friends don’t hear their accents. It takes an outsider to hear and point out the sonic nuances that we never notice in ourselves. And if the accent is to be portrayed—by a stage actor, for example—it requires a farcical overexaggerated caricature to portray the accent in a universally recognizable way.

This is the problem with our political discourse and how it is reported on by perfectly good and conscientious journalists. None of us are capable of hearing our own ideological accents, but they are glaringly obvious to the rest of the world. All of our assumptions are assumed and so we imagine them to be conventional wisdom. And you just can’t edit out your ideological accent when you are immersed in it any more than you could dry yourself off while swimming in a lake.

All of our [national] media outlets are located on the coast, as is the entertainment industry, as is our seat of federal governance, and so they are all immersed in one particular ideological accent. Not only do they not hear it, but they also can’t possibly hear it, nor should we expect them to. It can only be pointed out by an observant outsider and can only be illustrated or portrayed by outsiders with a sort of exaggerated vaudeville act—oversimplifying and overemphasizing small, nuanced tones and tenors.  Think, for example, the exaggerated and overheated Kabuki theater of political talk radio.

In the past, before the advent of internet and instant posting, the reporters lived in the same ideologically accented bubble, but if you wanted your story to be picked up off the wire in Topeka, or Racine, or Little Rock, or any town in Middle America, you had to get the attention of the local editor that was conversant in the local vernacular. If the local editor in Topeka did not pick up the story, it did not get read in Topeka. Now the newsrooms are populated by Ivy League–credentialed elites, just a younger version of the editors. And so again we miss the vital opportunity for writing in the vernacular of the nation rather than our own particular provincial perspective. After all, New York and Washington, D.C., are easily the two most provincial towns in America. The most obvious solution is to disperse our reporters to the hinterlands, but will any of them be willing to trade Manhattan for Racine?

Eric harkens back to pandemic coverage:

I take umbrage with the portrayal of essential workers by media organizations. As someone who has worked at grocery stores throughout the pandemic, I felt as if the media treated essential workers as a strange curiosity who do not consume media themselves. The use of the royal we in phrases like “We’ve all been at home the past few years” became so ubiquitous as to go unquestioned. Actually, many of us went out into the world on a daily basis. There were so many articles talking about the difficulties of isolation or cohabitating during the pandemic. But I could find none that addressed the struggle of an essential worker living with someone who never left the house.

Jaleelah sees a lot more hand-wringing about the unwillingness of young people to debate than she does real-world support for them to do it:

The biggest threat to debate on campus does come from administrators, but in an indirect manner: Debate clubs in Canada often receive little to no funding from their universities. Hundreds of curious students seek out my debate team, but since the university I attend started charging all clubs $100 per room booking (after 10 or so freebies), we don’t have the space for all of them to speak. Dozens of students who practice constructing and delivering arguments for weeks or months express interest in debating students from other schools. But since there’s some obscure rule against funding off-campus events, we can only send a handful of them to competitions. With so many prominent conservatives publicly lamenting the decline of debate, one might assume that sponsors are jumping to support the activity. That is sadly not the case.

Kimberly is glad that people who are obese are now portrayed in media and that fat-shaming is being challenged, but believes that almost all such portrayals are leaving out the health challenges of obesity:

I have three very good friends who are obese and they all suffer with diabetes and decreased mobility. All have had knee replacements and two have serious respiratory issues. On television, all that you see is fat and happy, with good health insinuated, whereas in reality that is often not the case.

Earl believes that “much of the media have a less-than-adult portrayal of religion in the lives of Americans.”

He writes:

The writer/reporter who admits to having been “raised Lutheran” or otherwise concluded their religious participation before finishing high school nevertheless will write or report on religion as if everyone has the same, often two-dimensional, perspective on a part of the human experience that has been around since humans were invented. When religious beliefs, dogma, and practices conflict with hot-topic issues in the secular, popular culture, the media usually make no effort to probe into the religious basis of such matters.

Media that pride themselves on accurate and in-depth reporting have knowledge of the U.S. political system and its history well beyond high-school courses. When writing and reporting on religious affairs, they need to educate themselves to a level commensurate with the topics at hand.

Leela opines on media portrayals of Asian Americans:

As a mixed-race Jewish teenage girl, I’ve never been able to find a piece of modern media that quite encapsulates my life. However, one of the biggest discrepancies between my life and the media is the current portrayal of “Asian stories.” I’m half South Asian, and nearly every time I see a movie or television show in the United States that claims to be capturing the “Asian experience,” it’s actually just about East Asians. Always Be My Maybe, Crazy Rich Asians, Fresh Off the Boat, Shang-Chi, Beef, Minari, and more films and shows that I’m encouraged to watch because they “capture what it’s like to be an Asian American” don’t have a single person who looks like me. I 100 percent believe that the stories told in these movies and television shows are important, and I don’t feel like South, Southeast, or Central Asians should have been randomly inserted into them. But just for once, I’d like to see a movie about the Asian experience that lives up to its marketing by actually including characters from more than one region of Asia.

Based on the majority of TV shows and movies that are promoted as “telling Asian stories,” you’d think Asia was only made up of China, Japan, Korea, and sometimes Vietnam. This impacts how Asian Americans like me, whose families don’t come from those countries, are treated. Even the action of casually referring to myself as Asian has led to me needing to open Google Maps to show others that India is in Asia, to “prove” why I can identify that way, and I have never felt comfortable joining organizations such as my school’s Asian Student Union because I feel as though I’m not the type of Asian that it was created for.

I also feel as though the media’s limited idea of who gets to be Asian American has impacted their reporting on hate crimes. When South Asians and Middle Eastern people (many of whom are also Asian) are targeted as “terrorists,” it should also be an issue that the Asian American community and their allies rally together and raise awareness about, just like we showed up to protest the attacks on East and Southeast Asians during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I can’t explain how amazing it was to watch Never Have I Ever and see it front and center on Netflix’s recommended shows during AAPI heritage month. Seeing characters who look like me and my family on a show that was included in a list of media about the “Asian experience,” a marketing tagline which used to only reaffirm my sense of not belonging in the Asian community, makes me smile every time I rewatch it. I hope that in the future, movies and television shows will start to get made that showcase the full range of diverse stories and experiences within the Asian diaspora.

Matthew opines on homeownership:

This will come as a very heterodox viewpoint to the narrative of my generation, but I disagree with the portrayal of home ownership as out of reach for most Americans. My partner and I were making less than $100K combined a year when we bought our home in Dallas. We had been renters our whole lives (mid-30s at the time) and lived in central Dallas in an affordable apartment in a VERY expensive area. Rents kept climbing but we knew we wanted to buy. We eventually looked at much more affordable homes in a slowly gentrifying area that was within five miles of downtown. We paid $225K for our home in 2016 and found our mortgage payment to be less than rent for many of our friends.

Our home needed lots of work. (Still does!!) It’s vintage 1969. No granite countertops, some really ugly carpet and wallpaper, but it’s our project. We’ve been doing bit by bit to make it better. When I hear so many people complain about the affordability of homes, I can’t help but think, “Of course you can’t afford to live where you rent right now!” The narrative that we’re being told is that you should be able to buy a house convenient to the best places in town. It’s not realistic! There are affordable houses available, they just aren’t where you want to live. You might have to sacrifice convenience, location, and amenities.

I realize that there are cities and places that are ABSOLUTELY too expensive and have terrible policies that have made homeownership a real struggle. I am really fortunate to have a good job and was able to afford the many surprise costs of buying a home. But, to constantly reinforce to a whole generation that they CANNOT afford to own a home doesn’t mesh with reality. That dream is possible with adjusting expectations and potentially looking outside your comfort zone.

John believes there is a negativity bias built into media:

The biggest difference between my personal observations and the media’s reported news is just how amazingly good everything really is in our country. Whether you are watching Fox News or reading The Washington Post, you might get the impression that things are very, very bad in America. They aren’t. While there are plenty of negative things to report on, unemployment is low, goods are plentiful, and people have discretionary money to spend.

Typical news quote: “Our country is divided as ever.” No, not really. And if the media wasn’t complicit in the politicians’ efforts to divide us into neat groups, we would be less divided. I have all types on my boat for fishing trips and all are welcome. Trump superfans to LGBTQ, we all have a lot in common, and in my experience, all you have to do to get along with most anyone is be polite and friendly (and maybe avoid political discussions).

But it really is more than that. Our country, somehow, is still behind some of the greatest innovations the world has seen. And our country keeps innovating, and it makes the world a better place. IT devices are reliable and capable in a way that even 10 years ago would’ve seemed impossible. Health care has advances that are simply amazing, helping people not just live longer, but live better lives. This list could just go on and on. What is often lacking, especially from TV media, is context. My spouse and I watch the evening news every day, and she often says, “I needed one more sentence.” Instead of getting that additional context, we get the next sensationalized outrage bait.

Dan and Vicky are curious about the explanation for a demographic shift:

What we see in the media that conflicts with our professional and personal experiences: The apparent frequency of transgenderism—i.e., individuals whose identities conflict with their biological sex. We are in our mid-70s. As children, one of us remembers Christine Jorgensen. That’s it in terms of individuals who are transgender. We had no knowledge of anyone in elementary school, high school, college, or graduate school who seemed to identify as a different gender than their biological sex.

In the ’70s one of us became a police officer, and spent her entire career in law enforcement. She was one of a group of five women who were admitted to the police academy in Seattle. She worked as a patrol officer, in corrections, setting up a marshals service for a county in Washington, as an advocate for abused women going through the court system, and as a juvenile probation counselor. The other one of us went to graduate school in the ’70s, earning a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Vanderbilt. Then he went to Illinois State University and taught for 30 years. His speciality was children and families. In that time he had a professional practice of psychology, he trained graduate-level counselors, and he was a psychological consultant for numerous community agencies.

Thus, in our professional careers we have seen or consulted for thousands of children and families. We also had children ourselves in the ’70s and ’80s and knew dozens and dozens of their friends, in addition to their schoolmates. In that time, we can, together, tentatively identify only ONE person who appeared to be transgender. One, in 70 years of knowing children and 40 years of working with children and in the community for both of us.    

One could argue that transgender people would have kept this to themselves in these decades, but that seems a stretch. We worked with children/adolescents/families on a very intimate basis … hundreds and hundreds of them. We also worked with students and co-workers who were virtually all kind and accepting people. Dozens and dozens and dozens of other professionals, all of whom would have been extremely open and compassionate with any child who would have expressed transgender ideas.

While neither of us denies the idea that there are people whose gender identity does not match their biological sex, the issue is that there seems to be a virtual explosion in numbers. To write this observation off as being due to people being unwilling or unable to communicate their gender confusion in the past does not seem possible given the extremely large number of children and adolescents we have known personally and professionally, and the number of other professionals who we knew well who consulted with us on their most challenging cases. Why? What explains the apparent explosion?

Gary remarks on demonization:

The most jarring thing for me is to see conservatives and liberals painted with such negative “brushes” by the media. I know several people from all viewpoints stretching from very conservative to very liberal. They are all decent people with the good of the nation at heart. Caring for and loving one another is not limited to one political viewpoint.  On one side you hear conservatives explained as uncaring Neanderthals who want a 1950s patriarchy. On the other side you hear liberals illustrated as crazy people whose minds are twisted like pretzels to reconcile all their conflicting ideological views. The media seems unable or unwilling to treat everyone with dignity and respect just for being a human being.