To express disapproval against the company’s plan to charge for access to its API, thousands of popular sub-Reddits or Reddit communities ranging from Apple Inc to gaming and music locked out their users on Monday and went dark.
Image Credits: CNN
Until now, the internet was still trying to gulp down the monetisation of API implemented by Twitter soon after it was acquired by Elon Musk last year. Now, recently Reddit also made a similar decision – to charge a hefty price for its API from developers. To show discernment against this decision, thousands of sub-Reddit including the Apple sub-Reddit have gone dark indefinitely. The planned protest comes as the criticism of the company’s recent announcement for its expensive API pricing which is likely to push other third-party Reddit applications out of business.
Beginning from next month, third-party app developers using Reddit’s API and data will be charged a huge price, And this amendment is likely to affect players across the industry – from big tech companies such as Apple and open AI to small developers.
Last month, developer and founder of popular sub-Reddit Apollo – Christian Selig said that he will have to pay around $20 million annually under the company’s new regulations. This means that he would be required to pay $1.7 million per month to keep the app running. At present, an average Apollo user, uses 344 requests every day. Now, these would be priced at $2.50 per month, which is twice the present cost of subscription – something that will be difficult for the app developer to afford.
The action was in talks for me after I didn’t announced in April that it would begin charging third-party apps for its application programming interface or API – which is a software network that allows a data provider and user to communicate with each other.
Beginning on July 1, reddit will charge its developers $0.24 for every 1000 API calls or less than one dollar per user every month. One of the main reasons read it is making the change is generating AI. The company‘s conversation forums have a lot of data that can be used to train tools like chat with GPT, the renowned chat bot backed by Microsoft’s open AI. However some of this data can even be collected in an ethical manner, as Reddit API makes it convenient for companies to directly find and collate the data.
According to the Reddit CEO, Steve Hoffman, “Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,“ and he doesn’t want to “need to get all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
All the subReddits are opposing the decision and almost all of the moderators have planned a 48 hour blackout in which the pages that or private, millions of users without access. Subjects like music, gaming, science, today I learnt – all of them having more than 50 million subscribers – are participating. Music credits are likely to protest in definitely. Peculiar than other social media platforms, Reddit is majorly dependent on community moderators or “mods“, Who check their sub-Reddit free of cost and rule out offensive content.
On Friday, soon after the protests began, CEO Huffman said, “The company can no longer subsidise commercial entities that require large scale data use as it needs to be a self-sustaining business.”
And now, it will be interesting to anticipate how reddit will respond to the protests.
