Reddit hit by protests! Check out the 'killer' reason and much more | Explainer
Reddit, the popular online discussion forum is facing major protests from its users, moderators, and third-party apps. Yesterday, thousands of subreddits went private as a part of their 48 hours long protest against the company's new API pricing policy. Reddit even suffered a massive outage on Monday after so many subreddits went dark. Even now, Reddit is struggling with frustrated users as most of the popular communities are not accessible to them. But what has prompted Reddit users and moderators to take such drastic measures and what exactly is this new API pricing policy that has been called a “third-party app killer”? Let us take a look.
On April 18, 2023, Reddit announced that it would start charging 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. The company plans to introduce it starting July 1.
As a result, Reddit will charge developers that require higher usage limits $0.24 for every 1,000 API requests. Apollo, a third-party Reddit app for iOS, said that with their current usage, the charges would cost more than $20 million a year.
According to Reddit, one of the main reasons is generative AI. The platform's conversation forums have a lot of data that can be used to train tools such as ChatGPT, the viral chatbot from Microsoft-backed OpenAI. While some of this data can be collected in an unstructured fashion, Reddit's API makes it easier for companies to directly find and collate the data.
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 he doesn't want to "need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies
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