Major subreddit admins are going to war with Reddit over monetization changes that will kill many third-party apps

pcgamer.com:

Hundreds of subreddits of all sizes and topics—including some of the big ones—will temporarily go dark beginning on June 12 in protest of changes to Reddit's API that they say will make it effectively impossible for third-party apps to operate.

Reddit first announced its plans for new Developer Terms in April, saying that while the release of its data API in 2008 enabled the creation of «thousands of fantastic applications» including moderation tools and bots of various sorts, it's time for changes to be made. «Expansive access to data has impact, and as a platform with one of the largest corpora of human-to-human conversations online, spanning the past 18 years, we have an obligation to our communities to be responsible stewards of this content,» Reddit chief technology officer Chris Slowe wrote.

As part of those updated terms, Reddit said it would begin enforcing rate limits on access to its free data API, and launch a «premium access point» for developers who want «additional capabilities, higher usage limits, and broader usage rights.» The new data API and developer terms were slated to go live on June 19.

Greater detail on the new rate limits were shared last week: Applications using OAuth for authentication would be allowed 100 queries per minute, while those not using it would be capped at just 10 queries per minute. Larger-scale applications would have to move to an «enterprise» access tier as of July 1; Reddit said it had already «reached out to the most impactful large scale applications in order to work out terms for access.»

It turns out that those terms are harsh. Christian Selig, creator of the popular Apollo client for iOS devices, said he was told that 50 million API requests will cost $12,000, a figure