Anyone who enters these days on Reddit you will notice unusual activity on the site. Or rather, an unusual lack of activity, with few news in terms of posts, many inaccessible subreddits and others that can be accessed but not published. Others maintain their activity, but they are a minority, and many of the most popular are in what is known as “private mode”, that is, they are not accessible even to those who are part of the community. Protest messages from different subreddits follow one another on the main page, alluding to protest actions against the site’s management and its policies. What is happening for Reddit to have this massive protest?
It all started around the middle of April. On the 19th of that month, the Reddit management communicated that it had decided to make changes in relation to its API. Apparently initially designed to prevent Artificial Intelligence models like ChatGPT from extracting data published in their communities (called subreddits) for free.
But the real consequences of this new policy were soon revealed, which basically involves charge a fairly large amount for API access from Reddit. Not just companies that want to use the data to train models. Also to the developers of apps outside the company. Both to use Reddit and to moderate their communities. Even those who create utilities designed to facilitate the use of the network for people with visual disabilities.
The Reddit API has been around since 2008, and it’s been pretty much open up until now, so developers could do just about anything they wanted through it, which has led to numerous apps that do the things we’ve mentioned, including others. His change, which will take effect on July 1 if the company does not change plans beforehand, will kill practically all third-party apps, due to the high prices that their creators would have to pay Reddit for the use of its API.
There will be some exceptions to this rule, such as the development of moderation tools, or the use of Reddit in educational or research settings. It also seems that they will get away, although this was clarified several days later, the developers of utilities for people with disabilities. But everyone else will have to pay to access the Reddit API.
API pricing changes and their implications for third-party apps
It wasn’t immediately clear how much app developers would have to pay Reddit. But they soon became suspicious. The first to do so, shortly after learning of the Reddit API policy change, and to ask the management for clarification, was Christian Selig, creator of what may have been until now the Reddit browsing app outside the company. most popular: Apollo. But when he asked what the changes and the new limits on the use of the API implied, the company only answered vaguely.
It didn’t take long for him to discover the implications of the changes, and what it meant for his app and many other developers. Speaking to Reddit several days later, Christian Selig reported that Apollo, which is only available for iOS, would likely have to pay around $20 million per year to continue running at its current scale and size. He also provided details on Reddit API usage pricing since July: about $12,000 for every 50 million requests.
Apollo makes about 7 billion Reddit API requests each month, bringing the bill it would have to pay each month to about $1.7 million. Selig pointed out that he would not be able to make his app profitable. User protests were not long in coming, as many use third-party clients to access Reddit because they don’t like official apps. Other developers joined the complaints, but from Reddit, with its CEO Steve Huffman at the helm, they paid no attention.
Faced with what they consider to be excessive fees for the use of the API, Apollo and other apps announced a few days later that their apps would close on June 30, since they would not be able to meet the large bills that Reddit would make them pay. to continue working. Meanwhile, the company continued to ensure that its rates were fair.
Suspicions that Reddit was trying to get money from anywhere at all costs in view of its IPO, scheduled for a few months from now, with the aim of achieving the necessary profitability to be attractive to investors. They already charge money for the ads they put on the website, but apparently it’s not enough, and charging developers to access their API seemed, at one point, a good plan to get more money.
They probably did not expect that the Reddit community would not welcome news related to charging for the use of their API. The discontent grew almost every hour that passed, and the moderators began to organize with their communities to take protest actions. At the same time, users of Apollo and other apps assured that they would stop using Reddit if they could not use their apps and they had to use the official ones because third-party ones stopped working due to the new payment policy.
The protests materialized in a coordinated action between moderators and users: a “blackout” of the subreddits that decided to join the protest from June 12 to 14. During the blackout, subreddits participating in the protest would be inaccessible, even to their members. No one would be able to see their content or post to them.
Meanwhile, the CEO of Reddit decided to call a virtual meeting with the users in which he would answer the questions in writing that they asked him, what is known on the network as “Ask me anything”, or “ask me anything”. This meeting took place last Saturday, but if with it Huffman intended to calm the spirits of the community, he achieved the exact opposite. He answered very few questions, and his responses made it clear that he was not going to back down on his API pricing policy one inch. In addition, he charged against Christian Selig and ignored very direct questions about the new measures.
Reddit user community and moderators unite to protest
The users and moderators, therefore, began with their protest. It soon became clear that this was not the protest of a few hundred users. More than 7,000 subreddits, the vast majority, changed their status and became private. Among them, communities with millions of users. The chaos generated was such that the Reddit website began to have problems some time after the start of the protest, and was inaccessible for several hours.
The company’s management blamed the problem on the protest, noting that the going private of the subreddits had caused various stability issues. After a while, the web was operational again, and meanwhile, from the Reddit address they downplayed the protest. As Steve Huffman shared in an internal message on Monday, he was convinced that the protest would pass, in addition to ensuring that the protest had not had a significant impact on the network’s income.
The Reddit CEO was convinced that most of the subreddits would be accessible again last Wednesday. Nothing could be further from the truth. Their propensity to continually pour more gasoline on the fire, coupled with several moderators claiming their moderation privileges had been removed from the subreddits they operated on to put other users up and reopen communities, sometimes against the wishes of users, led many communities to think about other forms of protest even before the end of the blackout.
The moderators of many subreddits momentarily opened up their communities for their members to participate in polls on what to do, with proposals such as continuing the blackout for several days, or even indefinitely. It has also been proposed, in some cases, to restrict the subreddit. So, The protest continues, but with more varied formats. Many thousands of subreddits are still inaccessible. Others have gone from private to restricted, and no one can post to them except who the moderators decide. In these cases, the new posts explain the reasons for the Reddit community’s protest, as well as their demands.
Meanwhile, the Reddit management continues not to budge an inch from their stance, waiting for the storm to pass. But it does not seem that the spirits are going to calm down in the short term, nor that the protest is going to end shortly. There are those who already predict that Reddit will end up falling, due to the refusal of its community to make its favorite access and moderation applications disappear, together with the attitude of Huffman and the rest of the board. Only time will tell how it all ends, but it does not seem that the reconciliation between users and the company, if it occurs, is going to be easy.
