Reddit is formed by the “people formerly known as the audience”, Jay Rosen (PressThink 2006). This remark by Rosen implies that Reddit’s gatekeepers are removed, and in its place are only ‘the people’. But the gatekeepers are still ‘the people’. Reddit suffers from a conflict “between the thoughtful and the jerks” (TEDGlobal 2005), an insight observed by Jimmy Wales on the moderation of his website Wikipedia. To tackle this conflict, Reddit’s community is empowered by democratic tools to either upvote or downvote content, giving users the power to moderate conversations on Subreddits (or groups). Under Clay Shirky’s idealised model of the Internet (TED@State 2009), Reddit may be a medium that “supports groups and conversations at the same time.” But Reddit does not support conversations, it controls conversations. The issue with Reddit is its eager ability to shut down conversations, for negative or positive reasons, by only a few downvotes. While voting helps to moderate the quality of conversations, ‘quality’ is loosely defined by the subreddit’s users. The decision to ‘upvote’ or ‘downvote’ a conversation is left up to ‘the people’. But who …