Global Courant
Thousands of popular Reddit communities devoted to topics ranging from Apple Inc to gaming and music locked out their users Monday in protest of the company’s plan to charge for access to its data.
Starting next month, third-party app developers using Reddit’s massive amounts of data will have to pay a price, and the changes could affect players across the spectrum — from companies with bigger pockets like OpenAI to small developers.
The Apollo app – popular among Redditors for its alternative interface to the official platform – has said its exorbitant cost has “made it impossible” to continue offering the service.
Here are some facts about the protest:
WHAT CAUSED THE BLACKOUT?
The move has been in the works for weeks after Reddit announced in April that it would charge third parties for its Application Programming Interface (API) – a software framework that allows a data provider and an end user to communicate with each other.
Starting July 1, Reddit plans to charge developers who need higher usage limits $0.24 for every 1,000 API calls or less than $1 per user per month
Apollo said that with their current usage, the cost would exceed $20 million per year.
WHY IS REDDIT MAKING THE CHANGE?
One of the reasons is generative AI.
Reddit’s conversation forums contain a lot of data that can be used to train tools like ChatGPT, the viral chatbot from Microsoft-backed OpenAI. While some of this data can be collected in an unstructured manner, Reddit’s API makes it easier for businesses to find and collect the data on the fly.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an interview with the New York Times in April that the “Reddit corpus of data is really valuable” and that he “don’t want to give all that value to some of the biggest companies in the world.” free.”
WHO WILL BE AFFECTED AND WHEN DOES THE REDDIT BLACKOUT END?
Thousands of subreddits — the forums dedicated to a specific topic on Reddit — are protesting the move, and most of their moderators have scheduled a 48-hour blackout during which the pages will go private, meaning millions of users won’t be able to access them.
Subreddits like r/Music, r/gaming, r/science and r/todayilearned – all with over 30 million subscribers – are participating. Some, like r/Music, plan to protest indefinitely.
Unlike most other social media platforms, Reddit relies heavily on community moderators, “or mods”, who monitor their subreddits for free to remove offensive or illegal content.
WHAT DO THIRD PARTY APP DEVELOPERS SAY?
Christian Selig, creator of the Apollo app for Reddit, tweeted last week that the service will end on June 30.
Huffman has said that other third-party apps, such as Reddit is Fun and Sync, have also decided that the new pricing is “not working for their businesses and will close before the pricing takes effect.”
WHAT DOES REDDIT SAY?
Huffman noted the frustration among many Reddit community moderators on Friday, but said the company can no longer subsidize commercial entities that need large-scale data usage because it must be a “self-sustaining enterprise.”
WHAT DO OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES DO?
Elon Musk’s Twitter in January restricted all third-party clients and apps and updated their rules for developers accessing its APIs.
Under the new rules, developers may not use the company’s API to create “a replacement or similar service or product for the Twitter application.”
Reporting by Tiyashi Datta, Akash Sriram and Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Edited by Devika Syamnath
