Reddit rebellion and the problem of community commercialization

The recent rebellion on Reddit subsided, but not over. The history of protests in online communities has more than 30 years. (Imgur ^★ , where I worked recently, had its own uprising in June: disgruntled users "seized the main page . " ) But Reddit is the largest online community ever. And this makes it a tempting object for experiments on community management and its commercialization. Each rebellion is different from others, but they also have common features.



The vast majority of online communities are owned by commercial corporations, where every dollar of profit is paid only to owners. Often the interests of companies are mixed with the common good so that they are difficult to divide. This leads to the fact that explicit attempts to extract profits are subject to censure of the community. But one cannot do without such a showcase of disinterestedness, otherwise volunteers who create basic value will consider themselves only hired employees with extremely low pay. It is easier to whitewash a fence than for a dollar.

Community commercialization faces the following challenges:

• The community considers itself democratic. The owner portrays that it is a republic, and he is elected. In reality, online communities are weak dictatorships. The company, which sheltered the community, has complete control over everything related to their software. Although the company owns the software, it is in fact only a part of the actual product in demand. It is complemented both by the value added by the authors who create and edit the content, as well as by the readers who give the content relevance and relevance. The result is a form of government combining the hypocritical righteousness of the oppressed and the timid semblance of democracy.
• Media businesses (which are the online communities that sell attention) are based either on mass and wide coverage, or on a narrow niche where they managed to find a gold mine. Most choose reach, which is why the company inclines the community towards the mainstream. But one of the foundations of the community is the internal language, which allows to separate "their" from "alien". In essence, this creates an entrance barrier for users who are forced to learn this language in order to join. To maintain community accessibility, it is necessary to purposefully blur what primarily makes it special.
• The presence of a user-controlled homepage allows you to give identity and power to users, rather than the platform itself. The typical Facebook or Twitter user is also intolerant of change, as is the Reddit user. But on these platforms there is enough information "feed" to take the attention and extinguish the power of outrage. A spark of resistance should spread more naturally through the internal subscriber communities, while remaining limited administration control over editorial. When Facebook launched the news feed, it inadvertently created a tool that allows users to turn against their owners. But since each user's tape is unique, and the final editorial is fully controlled by the owners of the resource, not a single story can be on the screens of all users for days. Users have much more control over their own destiny, if the main page is centralized and its content is determined by joint efforts.

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No online community with collective self-government has yet become a successful big business. Unlike shared subscription-based communities: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Youtube. Quite unexpectedly, Amazon’s retail network (owner of the absorbed Twitch communities, Goodreads, IMDB and DPReview) has the most solid understanding of self-governing communities among all mega-corporations. For Amazon, communities perform the same function that the Bloomberg media empire performs for Bloomberg terminals: by maintaining increased attention to a particular asset, they then successfully convert it into cash.

I enthusiastically follow the evolution of online communities. It is especially curious that so far no large self-governing community has emerged, based primarily on mobile devices. I believe that a large business can be built on the basis of a self-governing community, but this will require an unprecedented level of interaction between the community and its owner. It is possible that this will be Reddit or Imgur. Well, I'm going to do something else for now. ∎

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About the author: Sam Gerstenzang - is now creating something new, previously launched Imgur , part of the investment team @ a16z . Read more at samgerstenzang.com

KDPV: Vasily Timm [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons