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Reddit has mostly come back to life after a multiday protest by moderators took thousands of forums offline. But whether the freewheeling site has addressed the deeper tensions tugging at the company is another matter.

More than 8,000 subreddits, the specialised forums that make up the platform visited by almost 60 million people daily, went dark earlier this week to protest Reddit’s decision to impose expensive conditions on the creators of third-party apps. The move angered power users who depend on those apps to make Reddit easier to use.

The conflict highlights the innate tension surrounding Reddit as it envisions finally moving ahead with its long-awaited initial public offering, now anticipated for sometime later this year.

Chief Executive Officer Steve Huffman told his staff in an email Tuesday
that “like all blowups on Reddit, this will pass as well.”

Before moving past this week’s events, Huffman would be wise to recognise that the argument playing out is far bigger than this one issue. Users have long worried about what going public will mean for their beloved social-media platform, having seen sites like Twitter and Meta shift priorities and ethos under the pressures of pleasing Wall Street.

Unlike Meta and other, bigger tech peers, Reddit has managed to retain its identity as a non-corporate, free-spirited space. Aside from some advertising, the platform has changed little since its founding in 2005.

But Reddit has paid a price for staying cool and no-frills: The company isn’t profitable.

“It is a different kind of tech company,” app developer Christian Selig told me. “Reddit of course has to keep the lights on, and of course has server bills and engineers to pay, [but] they aren’t the ones providing the actual value. The value is the community and the platform.”

Selig is the creator of Apollo, a popular app for using Reddit. Like other apps, it needs access to Reddit’s application programming interface, or API. That access is currently free but will be subject to fees starting next month. Covering those fees for Apollo’s 1.5 million users will cost approximately $20 million a year, Selig estimates. He says that’s unfeasible and will have no choice but to shut the app down.

Some Reddit devotees were incensed about the new fees. Huffman called the protest “noise,” further infuriating some dedicated users who rightly view their role as essential to the site’s collaborative atmosphere.

Indeed, Reddit would struggle to function without the huge army of volunteers who do the work of moderating comments and keeping communities in check. Moderators removed 56.9 million pieces of content in 2022, according to Reddit’s most recent transparency report. If that were left to Reddit’s own small workforce, each of its permanent employees would have needed to review and remove approximately 30,000 posts each. That’s to say nothing of the wider role moderators play in hosting communities.

If he is to steer Reddit to a multibillion-dollar IPO, Huffman will need moderators to be on his side. Additional signs of dissent will chip away at Reddit’s value to investors.

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