Week 10: Exit, voice and the fork
When a volunteer community and its host disagree, the leverage volunteers hold is the work itself — and withdrawing it is the hardest call in the craft
10 May 2027
In June 2023 several thousand subreddits went dark over Reddit’s API pricing, including most of the largest. The moderators who ran them were unpaid volunteers withholding unpaid labour from a company preparing to list on a stock exchange. Within a fortnight the company had replaced the moderators of several protesting communities, which settled an old question about who those communities belonged to.
I was on one of those teams. The version of this you have read is that it was a principled stand that failed. The version I will give you in the Shift is messier: a team that had not agreed on its aims before it acted, a vote taken among moderators about a community of two million people who were not asked, and a fortnight during which the queue was unattended and the people we had spent six years protecting were left with nothing between them and the worst users on the platform.
The alternative to voice is exit, and volunteer projects have a rarer third option, which is to leave and take the work with you. Spanish Wikipedia’s contributors did it in 2002, over a proposal to sell advertising, and the proposal was dropped. It is the only real leverage in the arrangement, it is expensive, and it mostly does not work.
Outline#
- Hirschman’s exit, voice and loyalty, applied to unpaid contributors
- 2023: the blackout, the replacements, and what it established
- forking a commons: three forks, and why only one of them had to die
- what a fork needs to survive — the data, the tools, or the people
- withdrawal of labour when the people harmed are not the people you are bargaining with
Teaching team
- Ren Vasquez — Tutor