After staging a widespread blackout to protest Reddit's plans for a controversial new pricing policy, some users are now trying a different tactic: flooding the social network with John Oliver pictures.
Several of Reddit's largest self-moderated communities, including r/pics and r/aww, have turned spaces that were once devoted to images of everyday life, or cute and cuddly animals, into what may now be the internet's biggest repository for pictures of the comedian.
For the past several days, visitors to those groups have been greeted by page after page of Oliver photos — some real, some edited satirically, and all intended to grab the "Last Week Tonight" host's attention.
There have been numerous pictures of Oliver posing in sharply tailored suits, and screenshots of humorous moments from his show. There is Oliver as a koala. There are images of his face superimposed on the Mediterranean fruit commonly used to garnish martinis ("John Olive"). And an AI-generated image of Oliver as a "Game of Thrones" character ("John Oliver Snow").
While the sudden spread of Oliver-mania on Reddit may sound like the kind of freewheeling silliness that sometimes overcomes large groups of extremely online people, it also serves a deeper purpose. It's a calculated tactic to sustain a days-long protest targeting Reddit's corporate management in the face of a widening crackdown by the company against many of its own users and volunteer moderators.
Some Reddit forums have taken other steps, including marking themselves NSFW (not safe for work), deciding to go dark on certain days of the week, or by changing their stated scope of interests. The iPhone subreddit, for example, is now exclusively devoted to pictures of Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Reddit didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reddit users are protesting a decision taking effect next month that will introduce fees for apps to access Reddit data, much in the way Twitter has erected a paywall for third-party access to its own platform. Reddit, for its part, is looking to bolster its revenue ahead of a rumored initial public offering.
Reddit's critics have said they object to the suddenness of the change, as well as the steep proposed fees, which are expected to force multiple app makers out of business as soon as next week. The maker of a popular Reddit app known as Apollo has said Reddit's paywall would cost him $20 million a year in fees at current usage levels; the app will shut down on June 30 because the developer cannot afford to pay and cannot charge his own users enough to cover the costs.
Last Monday, more than 6,000 Reddit communities went dark to protest the move, including some of the platform's most popular forums, which claim to have more than 25 million members. Reddit's co-founder and CEO, Steve Huffman, has said the protest has had limited financial impact on the company, though some advertisers are reportedly pausing their spending on the platform and others have reported that Reddit's paywall proposal was preceded by a slowdown in Reddit's revenue growth.
Huffman has staunchly defended the coming move as necessary to help make Reddit a profitable enterprise. He has also sharply criticized Reddit's volunteer moderators who are committed to the protest, describing them as out of touch and unrepresentative of the forums they lead. And he has praised Elon Musk for his handling of Twitter, citing the company's billionaire owner as an inspiration for Huffman's own business decisions.
In the process, Huffman has appeared to make misleading claims about Apollo's developer and suggested Reddit may seek to have resistant moderators removed from their posts.
More than 2,500 communities on Reddit remain blacked out nearly two weeks into the protest. Most of the largest forums involved in the protests have now reopened to the public under pressure from Reddit's management, but groups such as r/pics and r/aww are adopting unconventional means of protesting, such as becoming hotbeds of Oliver content.
The decision to reopen but to thumb a nose at Huffman and the company in other creative ways reflects the cat-and-mouse game now being played by numerous communities on the platform. Their goal is to continue drawing attention to Reddit's policy change without running afoul of Reddit's terms of service and giving the platform an excuse to clamp down on the protests.
In selecting Oliver as a main object of obsession, however, Reddit users are also appealing to a man with a history of wading into tech topics on-air and causing real-world effects with his show's coverage. Over the past week, many Reddit users have expressed hopes that Oliver might air a future segment about suddenly becoming the face of the revolt, and perhaps feature their content on his show.
Oliver has not committed to using any of the material, but true to form, he himself gave users his blessing to continue posting his image on Reddit and provided even more fodder for them to plaster across the site.
"Dear Reddit," he tweeted last week, "excellent work."
