Reddit is the largest forum on the Internet and is now at the center of a hurricane: more than 6,500 subreddits, discussion forums, have been closed by the members of the community themselves. That is, they have gone from being public to private. What has happened and why has this situation occurred?
On April 18, the platform announced that it would charge for accessing its API (Application Programming Interface) for third parties with "additional capabilities, higher usage limits, and broader usage rights." The restriction applies from April 1. June The strategy follows the path of Twitter, which also announced in February that its app would no longer be free for developers.The objective is none other than to increase the company's profits.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman posted a statement on the same platform on Friday, June 9. In the letter, he addressed the users of the platform, noting that he wanted to explain "what is happening within the community and the frustration derived from the changes we are making to access our API." “Reddit must be a self-sufficient business, and to achieve this, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use,” he specified.
As a consequence, a Reddit client app, Apollo, will shut down on June 30. Otherwise, it would have to pay 20 million dollars a year. Variety further noted that "developers of other third-party apps, including Reddit Is Fun, Sync, and ReddPlanet, have also said they will shut down."
The reactions of the users of the forum platform have not been long in coming. A post on r/pics about this shutdown, titled “Reddit is killing third-party apps (and itself),” noted: “Reddit relies on volunteer moderators to keep its platform welcoming and free of objectionable material. It also relies on uncompensated contributors to populate its many communities with content."
“We implicate Reddit to listen to its moderators, its contributors, and its everyday users; to the people whose business has allowed the platform to exist at all: please do not sacrifice long-term viability for the sake of a short-lived illusion. Don't tacitly allow bad actors to work against your volunteers. Do not apply for your upcoming IPO without thinking about what may come next," the message warned.
Another of the affected subreddits, /r/Funny/, one of the most popular, has a warning when a user wants to access the forum. “/r/Funny has gone private as part of the coordinated protest against the exorbitant prices of the new Reddit API. This community has been closed and will not grant access requests during the protest."
r/Jokes, another of the affected channels, has spoken about the decision to charge for accessing the Reddit API: "It promises to have an adverse impact on both groups: without effective tools (which Reddit frequently promised and then failed to deliver), moderators cannot combat spammers, bad actors, or the entities that enable them, and without the freedom to choose how and where. access Reddit, many contributors will simply leave... The very elements that set Reddit apart, the foundations that attract its audience, will be removed, reducing the site to another dead cog in the Ennui Engine.”
The background to the problem has a secondary protagonist: the rise of artificial intelligence systems such as Chat GPT. The creators of Reddit already advanced last April in an article published in The New York Times that they wanted to charge for the information that the AI of Open AI and other similar ones obtain from their forums. All these chatboxes are "trained" through the articles and comments that users share on the internet, and Reddit is one of the main sources of information.
The company is aware of how valuable the information it shares for free is, and that large companies like Microsoft or Google are profiting from it. That is why it now proposes to close its API, which is the way developers have to download information from the platform for their personal or commercial use.
