This story was covered widely in the press last weekend, with the MediaCloud project tracking 92 articles in the mainstream media and 51 in its “tech blogs” dataset.Īs a PhD candidate spending my summer researching the work of moderators on Reddit, I’ve been asked repeatedly by journalists to share my results. Reddit’s management responded within hours, apparently after substantive negotiations with moderators, and promised to meet those demands. What may not have started as a protest quickly became one, with many moderators complaining that the company needed to offer better communication and better tools to its volunteer moderators.
Last Thursday and Friday, moderators of many of Reddit’s most popular discussion groups “blacked out” their subreddits, preventing access to parts of the site by Reddit subscribers and cutting off some of the company’s advertising revenue for half a day.
