Why Reddit lockdown is really about who owns the internet

Who owns the websites - or more precisely web communities - that are built by ordinary, most of the time faceless, web users? This is a question that would need to be answered probably soon by the top management of Reddit, aka the front page of the internet.

In case you are not familiar with Reddit, it is an influential web community with millions of members. These millions of members passionately create and curate content for sub-reddits on thousands of topics and with help of upvoting and downvoting of content, daily highlight or bury the information that they deem important. This could be a funny cat video shot by a five-year-old kid with a shaky camera or the US president's address at the United Nations arguing for the perennial world peace.

On Friday, vast (virtual) swathes of Reddit fell silent. Hundreds of sub-reddits closed their door to public, with moderators taking them private putting up notices that they were no longer open to a select few non-members. What happened? A sort of uprising against the top management of Reddit.

Before anything else, Reddit is an online community, forged in a tradition that was more common in the internet of early days when moderators of web forums wielded absolute powers and community came before the banner advertisements. But of late, it is changing.

In 2013, Ellen Pao joined Reddit as interim CEO and since then the company is trying to rein in the community in a way that gives it more leverage over the content that is curated and created within sub-reddits. Just like any other big messy user-managed web community, Reddit too has areas that are not easily palatable. It has sub-reddits that encourage racism, misogyny, neo-Nazi thoughts and other similar ideas that would be out of place in what we call a civilised society. At the same time, there are sub-reddits that are starkly NSFW (not suitable for work) in a fashion that is as spectacular and gory as that of the infamous 4Chan.

The Reddit management is hoping to clean the website to make it more presentable, possibly to advertisers, and to have more control on what is said or written on the front page of internet. In the last few months, this cleaning drive seemed to have picked up some pace. Last month, Reddit closed a sub-reddit that was "fat-shaming" obese people. The management has also stepped in to remove content it seems legally troubling or morally indefensible.

But such moves have also irritated Reddit users, particularly moderators who don't want interference in what they allow or not allow on their sub-reddits. Pao has been criticised again and again and has even earned a nick-name "Chairman Pao".

The immediate trigger for Friday's shutdown seems to be the removal of Victoria Taylor, who was responsible for running the incredibly popular Ask Me Anything sub-reddit. "Today, we learned that Victoria was unexpectedly let go from her position with Reddit. We all had the rug ripped out from under us and feel betrayed," the moderators running Ask Me Anything wrote on their sub-reddit as they locked down the section. This was followed by hundreds of other sub-reddits, which too jumped into the fray and locked down their sections.

The struggle between the Reddit management and users is a classic community verses owner tussle that we sometime see on the web. The best example of this tussle so far has been Digg. Once upon a time, when Reddit was very small, it was the Digg that could call itself the front page of the internet. Digg was wildly popular but then Digg owners tried to wrest the control back from the community that had built and nurtured it. The results were disastrous for Digg. It killed Digg.

We don't really know how this Reddit management versus Reddit users would play out in the long run, but so far whenever management has tried to take back the control of a community that web users have built, the results have not been pretty.

On a web that increasingly resembles a world of gated communities, Reddit is still one place that retains the charm of the old world internet - wild, chaotic, messy but also beautifully open and pulsating with unbound energy.

Let's hope that Reddit owners and users work out something to keep it the same.