Founder of Change My View subreddit, which has 700K+ subscribers, launches Change A View site, with paid moderators and some funding from Alphabet's Jigsaw
A FEW MONTHS shy of his high school graduation, Kal Turnbull came to a realization: Conversations on the internet are broken.
Context & Ripple Effects
Wired profiled the Change My View subreddit back in January 2018 as a rare pocket of civil debate — opinions posted expressly so commenters could challenge them under strict rules. Founder Kal Turnbull is now taking that format independent: a standalone Change My View site with its own domain, funded in part by Alphabet's Jigsaw and staffed with paid moderators rather than volunteers.
The move matters because it tests whether civility can be a product rather than a byproduct of platform policy. It arrives amid a broader search for alternatives to ad-driven social media — the same current behind Substack's pitch, which Wired UK later found compromised by the polarizing figures it enriches.
First-order effects
- Moderation on Change A View becomes paid labor instead of volunteer work — Turnbull is betting that compensated enforcement can hold the subreddit's civil-discourse standard at scale outside Reddit's structure.
- Alphabet's Jigsaw gains a direct stake in a civility-focused product, putting Google's parent company behind an experiment in engineered conversation quality.
Second-order effects
- Reddit loses a flagship demonstration of what its platform can host at its best, and faces a template risk: if paid moderation proves viable, large subreddits have a precedent for demanding compensation or migrating off-platform.
- Jigsaw's backing pressures rival platforms and foundations to fund similar moderation-as-infrastructure plays, since the cost of unpaid trust-and-safety labor is now visibly being converted into a fundable line item.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, community governance professionalizes: the durable communities of the next decade may be those that treat moderation as staffed work with dedicated revenue, not free labor atop ad-subsidized infrastructure.
- It also sharpens the fork in the road for 'healthier internet' ventures — Change A View bets on curated, moderated conversation, while Substack's experience shows anti-toxic positioning can still route money to deplatformed voices; which model sustains itself will shape where civic discussion migrates.
The trend: Online communities are splitting from ad-driven platforms toward professionally moderated, independently funded spaces, with corporate and creator capital racing to own the new layer.