It was only meant to be a 48-hour strike, but a week after the protest was due to end Reddit still finds itself shackled by strike action.
At the time of writing, 3,051 out of the site’s 8,829 subreddits remain ‘dark’, according to Reddark, a site set up to monitor the strike action. That means more than a third of the Reddit communities remain inaccessible to visitors.
Even some of the subreddits that have reopened to the public have found different ways to protest. The r/pics subreddit – one of the largest Reddit communities with more than 30 million subscribers – continues to only let members post pictures of the comedian John Oliver. The r/gifs community with 21.6 million subscribers is doing likewise.
How much has it hurt Reddit?
How much damage is the strike action doing to the site? It’s hard to say. Traffic figures recorded by the SEO service Ahrefs.com do show a noticeable decline in traffic to the site that coincided with the beginning of the strike on 12 June. Fewer page views means fewer ad impressions and less revenue.
However, that traffic seems to have largely recovered in recent days, as many of the protesting subreddits resume normal service.
Perhaps the greater long-term damage will be done to the site’s Google ranking. With subreddits going private, millions of pages that were previously ranking on Google will now be unavailable. Those articles will eventually be demoted or removed from results pages by the search engine, and even if those pages do come back online, they may not fully recover their previous ranking.
Protests continue
In a similar vein to the John Oliver protests, moderators are finding other ways to dig their heels in, without taking communities completely offline.
Some subreddits have been flagged as ‘not safe for work’ (NSFW). This makes the communities inaccesible to users who aren’t logged in on mobile devices and throws up age warnings on the desktop site. More damaging for the company, NSFW communities don’t display ads, meaning Reddit loses all revenue from them.
Reddit has been reportedly unseating moderators who are flicking the NSFW switch on seemingly innocuous subreddits, telling The Verge that: “Moderators incorrectly marking a community as NSFW is a violation of both our Content Policy and Moderator Code of Conduct”.
Meanwhile, the r/modcoord subreddit, which is used as a forum for the volunteer moderators, is prominently listing all the different methods of protest that are being currently deployed on the site. These include banning any post that includes the letter k, removing all rules and letting the community moderate itself, and promoting alternatives to Reddit in the sidebar found on each community’s page.
The ongoing protests leave Reddit and its confrontational CEO, Steve Huffman, in a tough spot. The company has shown no signs of backing down, with Huffman continuing to insist in interviews given this week that the company will continue to ramp up the price of accessing its APIs, the move which sparked the protests in the first place.
How long the site can continue to alienate the volunteer moderators that keep it alive remains to be seen. If a week’s a long time in politics, it’s even longer in social media.
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