![]() ![]() Over 7,000 subreddits have now gone dark for 48 hours to protest against Reddit’s new API rules. RIF’s developer wrote in a Reddit post that the company has “unfortunately shown a consistent unwillingness to compromise on all points”. But for some of the bigger third-party apps, the new API costs will run into millions of dollars: app Apollo has confirmed it will cost $20 million a year for it to access the API under the new price point.Īs a result, Apollo and other third-party Reddit apps like RIF, ReddPlanet and Sync have all confirmed they’ll shut down on June 30 due to the prohibitive costs. Reddit says 90% of third-party apps will still have free access. The plans were first announced in April, with third-party developers trying to plead their case ever since. From July 1st, Reddit intends to charge third-party developers with higher usage needs 24 cents for every 1,000 API calls. What are third-party app developers saying?Ĭhristian Selig, creator of the Apollo app for Reddit, last week tweeted the service will close down on June 30.Reddit launched a free API in 2016, but it’s making some big changes. Unlike most other social media platforms, Reddit is heavily dependent on community moderators, "or mods", who police their subreddits for free to weed out offensive or illegal content. Some like r/Music plan to protest indefinitely. Subreddits such as r/Music, r/gaming, r/science and r/todayilearned - all with more than 30 million subscribers - are participating. Thousands of subreddits - the forums dedicated to a specific topic on Reddit - are protesting the move and most of their moderators have planned a 48-hour blackout during which the pages will go private, meaning millions of users will be left without access. 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 in the world for free." Who gets affected and when will the Reddit blackout end? 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'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. The action has been in the works for weeks after Reddit announced in April 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.įrom July 1, Reddit plans to charge developers that require higher usage limits US$0.24 for every 1000 API calls or less than US$1 per user every month.Īpollo said that with their current usage, the charges would cost more than US$20 million a year. Here are some facts about the protest: What prompted the blackout? The Apollo app - popular among Redditors for its alternate interface to the official platform - has said the exorbitant fees have "made it impossible" to continue offering the service. Starting next month, third-party app developers using Reddit's vast troves of data will have to pay a price and the changes could affect players across the spectrum - from deeper-pocketed companies such as OpenAI to small developers. Thousands of popular Reddit communities dedicated to topics ranging from Apple to gaming and music have locked out their users in protest against the company's plan to charge for access to its data. ![]()
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