Alyssa Widlock At the age of 11, she started searching for people like her on the Internet. Back in the early 2000s, what she found was not at all what she had hoped for. “Being transgender online is not a big deal,” she said. “There’s some fascination with it and there’s some stories about transformation. But it’s either porn or…porn.”
So when Videlock began exploring Reddit about a decade later, she was especially grateful. She said she still keeps the secret from family and friends, and finding a place where she can talk to other trans people helps keep her sane. On Reddit, trans people have strength in numbers and the ability to fight trolls. Through an elaborate system of volunteer moderators, Reddit allows its communities (called subreddits or subs) to cultivate their own rules, culture, and protections. Substitutes frequented by Videlock, such as r/asktransgender and r/MtF, are particularly good at blocking harassment. “It felt like I could make a name for myself out there,” she said.
For Videlock, lurking on Reddit became a prelude to sporadic postings, which eventually became a prelude to making a name for herself in the real world, a transition she began in 2017. A few years later, she watched a video of a trans woman playing piano on r/pan, Reddit’s live streaming service, and was moved as moderators shot down one vicious comment after another. The spectacle inspired her to become a presenter herself.
The 33-year-old software developer who lives in New York continues to volunteer about five hours a day, seven days a week, eliminating spam, stopping fights, and neutralizing hateful slurs on some Reddit subreddits, including r/LGBT, Reddit’s more One of the biggest subscribers. She joins the ranks of more than 60,000 mods who moderate subreddits that range from creatives (r/nosleep, a community for writing first-person horror novels) and supporters (r/REDDITORSINRECOVERY) to the predictably vulgar (r /ratemypoo) and unpredictable disgusting content (r/FiftyFifty, a community with 2.2 million members that share blind links, about half of which lead to stomach-churning content).
For better or worse, Reddit has long been an island of authenticity in an increasingly artificial world: a place where real people hide behind the privacy of pseudonyms and share their fervent passions, expertise, and morbid thoughts; People hide behind the privacy of pseudonyms to share their fervent passions, expertise, and morbid thoughts; Viral memes and movements emerge from raw likes and chatter; 1 million users each donate 1 to strangers dollars, and become a millionaire just for the fun of it; a place where people with alcohol problems, parenting crises, crushing debt burdens, or gender confusion can find each other and exchange thoughts about their struggles. (One adult industry expert estimates that there is also more porn on Reddit than on PornHub — a claim that Reddit disputes.)
After years of being a relatively quiet user, Videlock gained a new appreciation for Reddit as a volunteer. She also moderates a Discord, but there’s no comparison: Reddit moderators share tools and tips that allow them to be more proactive and strategic. For example, trolls sometimes post malicious comments and then quickly delete their accounts or the comments themselves—a sneak tactic that can help them evade detection and punishment. As a Reddit moderator, Videlock has a free third-party application at her disposal that allows her to retroactively delete comments.
Widlock realized that as a Reddit moderator, she also had the attention of a major social media company. For a site with 73 million daily users and more than 100,000 Reddit subreddits, Reddit has a very small number of paid employees—about 2,000 employees and a few hundred contractors in San Francisco, New York, and some cities outside the United States. . Whenever staff members asked moderators for feedback, Widlock stepped up: She answered calls, conducted surveys, and answered repeated questions about her experience. What keeps you here? How to identify bad apples? When Reddit rolls out new features, Videlock always offers to try them out.
So in early June 2023, a staff member on Reddit’s community management team (the part of the company that works most directly with moderators) asked Videlock and several other volunteer leaders to attend a meeting with Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman video call. The executive hopes to quell concerns that recently announced policy changes are spreading quickly. For the first time, the company is charging for access to its application programming interface (API), a system through which software developers outside the company have been getting content from Reddit for nearly 15 years.