Freeloader Culture

Today in Tedium: In many ways, the internet is a network driven by literally millions of examples of the same problem happening over and over—people freeloading on access to resources someone else made available for free. We all do it—some of us want to read paywalled articles, so we try to find ways around the paywall. We hate distractions, so some of us turn on ad blockers. We don’t want to pay for every cable channel or streaming service, so we load up torrent programs (unless you’re Gen Z, then you may not know what they are). In many ways, the recent debate around Reddit has been a discussion of infrastructure and freeloading. Who’s getting the free ride? And who’s stealing resources from whom? In many ways, Reddit represents a microcosm of how the internet works when it comes to people taking advantage of free resources. So with that in mind, today’s Tedium ponders freeloaders and free-riders in the digital era. — Ernie @ Tedium

When and why freeloaders first became a thing

One could imagine The Three Stooges leading a “Freeloaders Association,” an ad-hoc name for the makeshift group of people who showed up at an event just to take advantage of the free food.

In the Great Depression era of the 1930s, this term was used in newspapers, and helped to popularize the freeloader phrase, which was a nonentity before that point.

If I had to nail down where this phrase came from, I would root it to a now-obscure movement that emerged from the United Kingdom in the early 20th century, the Unionist Free Food League. The group, which included a number of prominent politicians among its membership—most notably Winston Churchill, who later left—came to life in an attempt to fight a tariff against food imports into the United Kingdom. It was not literally arguing for free food, but food free from additional taxes. (Yes, it is ironic that the roots of a concept tied to free food come from a conservative movement, but stick with me here.)

It didn’t work out—the movement died off within a few years, with nobody really taking the politicians’ side. A skeptical take on this movement from a 1904 article in the Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser breaks down the somewhat disconnected nature of the phrasing:

The Free-fooder, if we may hazard a rough guess, is one who wishes the food supply of this country to be free of taxation, and who, where it is proved to his satisfaction that food is already heavily taxed it still prepared to resist any proposals, no matter how important, how sound, or how world-wide in their incidence they may be, which will cost the working man (blessed word, “working man“) a few shillings a year extra for his food. You may tax his beer and other liquors as much as you please, as you do you may make the poor working man pay fourpence an ounce for a farthing’s worth of tobacco, and which, mark you, he prefers to food when it comes to a pinch, but you must not tax his “food.” The Free-fooder is a doctrinaire who subscribes to the theory of the Free breakfast table,” and shibboleths of that kind and though you were to prove to him that a mere readjustment of taxation on food would help him, help his kinsfolk in the Colonies, and hurt nobody, he still cries Free-food in reply to every argument, just as Longfellow’s mad mountaineer replied, “Excelsior” to all comers.

To put it another way, Free-fooders were more about economic freedom—or really, just against import taxes on food—than they were about getting things in a gratis fashion. But “free-fooders” is a very short skip away from free-loaders, which implies that a connection between the two may have been indirectly made, especially given their relatively close historical proximity.

The term freeloader implies a degree of shamelessness about what those partaking in free experiences are doing, and is sort of implied in the first mention of the term in a Miami Herald sports article in 1933. The article is basically a gossip roundup of local golfers and sports betters, and the tone is mocking:

George Ryall, former president of the Freeloaders Inc., has just been elected chairman of the board and served in that capacity at the Miami Beach Kennel club Monday evening.

Mr Freddie Hayden is now president of the Freeloaders and stands up well under the responsibilities thereof. Mr Ryall still is chairman of the arrangements committee and is seeking some angel to step forth with gratis food and drink for his organization next week.

From that starting point, “freeloaders” became a heavily used phrase to imply a certain lack of grace in accepting handouts—and early on, it was used in tandem with the phrase association, suggesting an organization of people who got together just to steal your food.

One notable example of what is traditionally meant when the term “freeloader” gets thrown around comes from the Republican congressman Charles S. Gubser, who said this about journalists in 1958:

I should not say this but there is no greater group of freeloaders in the world than the press. They will take anything they can get . They criticize our junkets, yet they are the first to accept them for themselves.

Gubser quickly walked back the remarks, which he claimed “were made under great emotional stress” after being upset that the press was going to publish something negative about a political ally.

Free beer, often handed out in freeloading contexts. (Jonah Brown/Unsplash)

Now, freeloaders aren’t necessarily a problem if you know how to manage them. If you’re trying to convince people to join your club or buy a condo, a promise of free pizza is an excellent way to get people through the door. If you’ve ever heard the phrase “free as in beer,” same concept. Keep in mind that you might be drinking that beer at a marketing or political advocacy event, or it might be offered at a work party by your employer.

In the modern day, freeloaders have continued to maintain a certain degree of negative connotation, but the concept has expanded well beyond food. If you think about the internet as a whole, it couldn’t work without some degree of freeloading. If people didn’t have free email addresses, they wouldn’t be able to log in anywhere. Without free Wi-Fi, odds are they may not even leave the house.

Society requires a degree of access to public resources, or we wouldn’t be able to take part in the digital culture we have.

The problem is, someone has to pay for the bill—and they want to get something back for it.

(Brett Jordan/Unsplash)

Reddit has a freeloader problem—and a free-rider problem

Reddit, like many social networks, is a platform built for freeloaders, with the idea that the free users are not actually the customers, but the product. After all, if they weren’t there, the platform’s value would not exist. The problem for Reddit has been, essentially, that these users, despite their internet-dominating scale, don’t generate enough value for the company to make them profitable. They’re handing out more red solo cups full of alcohol than they’re getting buyers of their service.

And that is leading the company to look deeper in the system to figure out where to cut waste.

And in that process, in Reddit’s view, they found a very significant free-rider problem: Users of the company’s API were aggressively taking value from the platform without being required to give anything back. API users are basically allowed to do nearly anything with the company’s API, including compete directly with Reddit in the form of applications, and the rules Reddit has put into place have meant that they weren’t paying their fair share to access an important part of the platform.

Of course, on the flip side of this, one could argue that the free-rider problem is of Reddit’s own making. The network decided not to invest in certain experiences that were important to end users, particularly mobile apps, which left an opening for other companies to take advantage of the market gap. But on the other hand, Reddit failed to offer a reasonable option: At first, it didn’t have a decent app at all; later, it bought a decent app but failed to keep it usable for many classes of users.

And on top of all that, it never charged a reasonable rate for its API. The result is that the company has so many free riders that it cannot support them anymore, and the problem is becoming worse, because artificial intelligence is creating many more free riders, many of whom will extract data from its API but not create any value for the Reddit platform whatsoever.

Meanwhile, a completely separate free-rider problem had emerged. Know those freeloaders that Reddit has been attracting to its platform? Turns out that some of them have been making Reddit such a valuable place to be that Reddit was arguably getting more value from them than the communities were from Reddit. And so, when Reddit removed a point of value for them—the applications that made it possible to easily moderate their communities—they responded by “blacking out,” reminding the platform that they arguably hold all the value.

The problem is, Reddit does not see it that way. Instead, they see the moderators as the free-riders, rather than the other way around. At least, that’s sort of how it feels, given CEO Steve Huffman’s recent quotes on the matter.

“The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic,” Huffman told NBC News last week.

Huffman, without explicitly stating it, has essentially implied that Reddit’s most important moderators—who worked for free, generated all the value for the communities, and kept them safe—are merely freeloaders, and that Reddit ultimately owns the platforms these freeloaders built.

The implication is not to be missed. Huffman does not value the community that makes his platform viable. This is an excellent way to turn a free-as-in-beer problem into a free-as-in-speech response.