Reddit's CEO is threatening to remove moderators who are backing the ongoing subreddit blackout on the social media platform.
In an interview with NBCNews on Thursday, Steve Huffman took a shot at protesting moderators, calling them “landed gentry” for keeping their subreddits private for the last four days.
Huffman plans on making a rule change that would allow users in those subreddits to vote out moderators participating in the blackout protest. “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,” he said in the interview.
On the same day, Reddit itself warned it could remove moderators for keeping their subreddits private, citing the company’s existing rules. “If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users,” the social media platform says.
The threat could bring an end to the protest, which started on Monday and grew to include more than 8,400 subreddits. It was supposed to last 48 hours, but thousands of subreddits have pledged to remain private indefinitely, although the number has fallen to around 4,800 from 6,500 on Wednesday morning.
The subreddits are protesting the company’s controversial plan to charge for access to the Reddit API. Reddit argues that some apps are scraping Reddit’s data to train their AI language models while offering no benefit to the social media platform and its users. The proposed charges, however, will shut down several third-party apps, including Apollo, which said its bill could top $20 million per year.
Despite the protest, Reddit refuses to backtrack on its API plan. On Thursday, it published a blog post that claimed more than 80% of the top 5,000 subreddits remain open.
In an interview with NPR, Huffman also described the protests as coming from a “small group that’s very upset," and argued that the blackout "really affects...the everyday users, most of whom aren't involved in this or the changes that spurred this."
That’s a shift from Huffman’s statement a week ago, when he told users: “We respect when you and your communities take action to highlight the things you need, including, at times, going private. We are all responsible for ensuring Reddit provides an open, accessible place for people to find community and belonging.”
So it's no surprise that some moderators and users are blasting Huffman for cracking down on the protest. “Reddit's communication has been poor from the very beginning,” says a post in a subreddit devoted to the ongoing blackout.
“The audacity of [Huffman] to call volunteer moderators a ‘landed gentry’ while he is a multi-millionaire is pretty crazy,” wrote another user. “This dude is more wealthy than 99% of the world could ever dream of, but he complains about people who most likely aren't even close to his net worth running communities on his website?”
Still, it remains unclear if the moderators will press on or back down in the face of Huffman’s threat. For now, top subreddit communities—including r/aww, r/music, r/science, r/videos, and r/NBA—along with dozens of others, remain private.