Reddit is also working on incorporating more accessibility and moderation features into its own apps and other systems to reduce users’ reliance on independent apps that can’t afford the coming data fees. “Everything is going in the right direction,” Sohn says. Next they will do the same for academic users. Over the past week NCRI and Reddit have vetted Pushshift users and reinstated access to several hundred moderators. “This was really a concern about not knowing who is using their data and for what reasons,” Sohn says. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman likened mods to “landed gentry” flexing undemocratic power as he tried to describe tensions within Reddit’s community.Įthan Zuckerman, professor, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.Īdam Sohn, CEO of NCRI, says that Pushshift’s shock shutdown resulted from a miscommunication and that Reddit has restored his team’s ability to download new posts free of charge, under an exemption for noncommercial projects. The policy shift has triggered two months of turmoil, including mass protests by Redditors and a mod rebellion that has left 2,400 of the platform’s over 100,000 communities shut down.
The Pushshift blockade and its consequences are just part of the collateral damage from an aggressive pivot by Reddit’s leaders to shut off free, wholesale access to the platform’s content by outside software. Researchers studying online communities would be forced to put projects and doctoral dissertations on ice. If it went stale, mods, as Reddit calls moderators, would have to work overtime or let more trash content accumulate. That was a problem for more than just NCRI, because some of Reddit’s 50,000 volunteer moderators depend on Pushshift to quickly investigate problem users, and many academics rely on the service. They were roused by 6:30 am phone calls from a colleague warning that Reddit had started blocking the institute's Pushshift service from updating its ongoing archive of every post on the discussion platform. Social media researchers at the Network Contagion Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, got a rude awakening early last month.
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