Reddit, the widely popular social media platform, is all set to change the playing field of bots forever. Steve Huffman, CEO and co-founder of Reddit, recently announced that the platform will start charging third-party entities to access their application programming interface (API). According to Huffman, this charge is essential as the API data is extremely valuable and ought not be used for free by large companies such as Google and OpenAI. API enables developers to access data from Reddit in a structured and organized way.
The availability of Reddit’s data has resulted in some of the most popular bots being created and trained on the platform, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing Chat, and Google’s BARD. Reddit reportedly has over 430 million monthly active users and 1.2 million special interest communities – a great source of fresh and relevant data. A number of search engines, including Google and Microsoft have been provided access to scrape data from Reddit, thus improving its search rankings and leading more visitors to the platform.
However, given the rapidly increasing popularity of language models-based chatbots, Reddit realized that it was not gaining much from providing its data for free. Consequently, the platform has now begun its operation to charge for access to its API Data. While access will be free for developers who use it to create applications that enhance user experience, pricing for other third-party access is currently unavailable.
Steve Huffman is an American entrepreneur and computer programmer. He is best known as the co-founder and CEO of Reddit, the social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website which is the 5th most visited website in the US and 15th most visited website in the world. He was also the co-founder of air travel company Hipmunk. After graduating from the University Of Virginia, Steve joined Y Combinator and launched his first company, Redditt. He remains one of the influential figures in web 2.0 and continues to manage Reddit as its Chief Executive Officer.
