The moderators of Philly’s largest subreddit wanted to protest a new policy. Then I-95 collapsed.

If a highway collapses in Philadelphia and no one is able to post on Reddit about it, did it even happen?

That conundrum became reality earlier this month on r/Philadelphia when a section of I-95 collapsed, sending far Northeast residents into a commuting frenzy. The forum with over 449,000 members on Reddit serves as a place for city residents to post news, questions, memes, and complaints about life in Philly.

The subreddit went offline from June 12 to 14 as part of a sitewide blackout to protest a policy change that would charge third-party apps for access to Reddit’s application programming interface, effectively shuttering many of the tools moderators use to maintain forums.

Set to go in effect July 1, Reddit’s policy change was thought to initially impact apps that help visually impaired Redditors and aid thousands of unpaid volunteer moderators in removing hate speech and spam. One moderator, a South Philly resident The Inquirer spoke with, said the decision for the 11 moderators who run r/Philadelphia to participate was an easy one.

The moderator, who has been posting on Reddit for over a decade, expressed anger at the policy change. She declined to give her name out of harassment and doxxing concerns. “Reddit is ignoring just an entire section of its user base.”

A Reddit spokesperson told The Inquirer that the platform spends “multi-millions of dollars on hosting fees” and while the company is in favor of the benefits third-party apps can bring to the site, “Reddit needs to be fairly paid to continue supporting high-usage third-party apps.”

More than 8,000 forums participated in the two-day protests, causing a brief Reddit outage and stoking fears among advertisers. Nearly 3,400 subreddits are still restricting public access as of Tuesday, according to Reddark, including several of the website’s most popular forums, such as r/Music, r/history, and r/programming — which have a combined reach of more than 45 million users.

The r/Philadelphia subreddit, however, is not one of them.

When the moderators posted a poll to the forum last week that asked members to vote on whether to continue the blackout or reopen to the public, reopening won by a margin of about 6 to 1. Frequent posters in the forum were also mad as hell.

“I-95 collapsed and you guys still closed off the day after…” commented one user. “Nobody cares about mods having a tantrum over a third-party app.”

“It was stupid enough y’all went dark for 48 hours after the 95 collapse. You’re only hurting the community by continuing this petty ish,” wrote another.

The forum’s moderators, meanwhile, see the subreddit as a place to talk about news, not deliver it.

“Our job as mods is not to verify everything on the subreddit,” said another moderator, a Kensington resident who also requested anonymity over doxxing concerns. “Imagine saying out loud, ‘I get my news from [a Reddit moderator].’”

The backlash from Philadelphia subredditors treats the forum as a bonafide news source, inadvertently pitting virtual labor organizing against information needs. But, as past protests show, the inconvenience is the point.

The r/Philadelphia subreddit is part news feed, part hot take machine, and entirely a community in and of itself.

The latter is what drove moderators to dedicate hours of unpaid time to manage the group.

For at least some users, r/Philadelphia is a viable news source, where tips about military tankers parading down Walnut Street, a new tenant for the old Center City Applebee’s, and when exactly the I-95 live stream started. The Inquirer has even used the subreddit to host conversations about reporting on the mayoral primary and potential new Sixers arena.

Many r/Philadelphia posters were upset by the decision to stick to the blackout in a time of crisis. To them, the moderators — and the blackout itself — were depriving Philly residents of a place to communicate or post helpful traffic detours.

Reddit, as a host platform, doesn’t think it’s a news website. Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman has previously rejected calls to fact-check or disallow COVID-19 misinformation, while the company filed an amicus brief siding with Google in the Supreme Court Case Gonzalez v. Google, arguing that making social media platforms liable for harmful or untrue information would hurt their existence.

The r/Philadelphia moderators were surprised by members’ response to the blackout: One moderator said several users privately messaged the moderators to ask if they were participating. And when moderators posted in advance of the blackout, it was received positively, with a 94% upvote rate.

Most subreddits on Reddit were supportive of their moderators’ decision to do what amounts to “a virtual walkout,” said Morgan Sung, a TechCrunch reporter who covers the platform.

What makes r/Philadelphia different, to Sung, is that the forum coalesces around a location, not a hobby, or a piece of media, or a sports team.

“I think there’s a sense of entitlement,” said Sung. “These people have gotten used to receiving a certain level of hyperlocal news from Reddit, and for that to stop during a major crisis, is confusing.”

The blackout boils down to a debate about the value of volunteer labor on a part of the internet that demands it.

Reddit moderators do $3.4 million worth of unpaid labor — about 3% of the platform’s 2019 revenue — if they were compensated at the standard hourly wage for a freelance content moderator, according to a study from Northwestern and the University of Minnesota.

These moderators also removed over half of the content found to violate the platform’s rules, per Reddit’s 2022 transparency report, and have worked to produce algorithms that have halted the spread of propaganda on the site in the past.

In order to do this without allowing Reddit to cannibalize all of their free time, most moderators rely on third-party apps to separate out things like bots or spam. The moderators The Inquirer spoke with rely on plug-ins like Reddit is Fun, which is shutting down ahead of the policy change, and Toolbox, which has condemned Reddit’s decision, to sift through posts.

Over the course of 30 days between May and June, the r/Philadelphia mods — through apps and manual labor — had removed about 1,800 comments from the channel that violated the subreddit’s rules of inciting violence, posting graphic content, or self-promotion, among other things.

“We deal with the whole spectrum of hate — dog whistles, homophobia, bigotry, you name it,” said the South Philly moderator.

Reddit CEO Huffman has claimed that 98% of apps won’t have to pay at all to access Reddit’s data and programming interface, including accessibility measures and tools that help moderators do their jobs, contradicting conversations developers have had about pricing structure. Huffman has also referred to moderators as a “landed gentry,” and wants to instate other new policies aimed at checking their power.

The Reddit spokesperson also said that the platform is working on a variety of in-app tools for moderators, including the ability to update rules for forums and a log of all the actions taken by other moderators in a subreddit. Moderators aren’t optimistic, though, since they said Reddit has promised updates for moderators since 2015 and largely hasn’t delivered.

“People are interpreting this as ‘mods won’t be able to mod anymore.’ It’s not that. It’s ‘mods won’t be able to mod efficiently.’ We only have a fixed amount of time that we’re going to do this work,” said the r/Philadelphia mod from Kensington. “Sexist, misogynistic, what-have-you content won’t get removed as quickly, and people who should be banned will stick around longer.”