I spent this past weekend at a punk festival in Gainesville, Florida, reminiscing with some old friends who were playing a show there after a 20+ year hiatus. Inevitably, we all reflected on the ways that we and many of our friends had changed since we were idealistic kids. Though we had mostly wound up as (cooler than average, but still basically lame) moms and dads with normal day jobs, many of us were still actively engaged with music and art, still committed to the hopeful visions that had moved us when we were 18, and even more concerned about the state of the world than we were back then. But we all knew other folks from our scene who seemed to have lost the plot somehow, as if none of the things we cared about back then mattered anymore. And that’s what seems to be happening with Reddit these days.

Co-owned for a time by open internet wunderkind Aaron Swartz, Reddit was a solid citizen in the internet community for many years. Reddit was part of the historic SOPA/PIPA internet blackout protest in 2012. As FAI’s Luke Hogg pointed out on X, Reddit joined a letter in 2013 in support of reforming the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, arguing that, “parts of the DMCA can interfere with consumer rights and competition policy…. Congress must take action to ensure that laws and policies are keeping up with the pace of technological change. Not addressing these questions will stunt advances in access to digital media for people with disabilities and may prevent new innovations and competitive uses….” As recently as 2019 Reddit received a 5-star rating from EFF’s “Who Has Your Back” report for its policies on takedown requests, including DMCA takedowns. 

Lately, though, Reddit has been singing a different tune, leaving some of us to wonder why Reddit started to suck. An early sign of trouble came in 2023, when the site started making user-hostile moves to boost profitability (a classic case of Cory Doctorow’s brilliant concept, “enshittification”) ahead of its IPO. Then came AI, and multi-million dollar deals for access to Reddit user-created content for training. Now it looks like all that open internet stuff isn’t so important to the company. Last week came the coup de grace, a bogus DMCA lawsuit designed to route around fair use and undermine the very concept of an open internet. As James Grimmelmann points out, the case is pretty flimsy and even self-defeating, with federal copyright claims pled in a way that will trigger federal preemption of their related state claims. But the real tragedy is seeing another platform seemingly turn against the open internet that made its own success possible, attempting to pull up the ladder behind it now that they’ve amassed a loyal user base and a trove of valuable user data.