Reddit, the largest forum on the internet, is facing a turbulent situation as more than 6,500 subreddits have been shut down by its community members. The subreddits, which were previously public, have now become private. The cause of this sudden shift in the community’s behavior lies in Reddit’s decision to charge for accessing its API for third-party applications. The new changes, which were announced on April 18, will impose restrictions from June 1, 2021.
The changes follow a similar move by Twitter, which also announced in February that its app would no longer be free for developers. The objective is to increase profits for the company. In response to the changes, Reddit CEO, Steve Huffman, posted a statement on the platform, addressing users’ concerns. Huffman explained that Reddit needed to be self-sufficient and that the company could no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.
Notably, Reddit client app, Apollo, will shut down on June 30, as it would have had to pay $20 million per year to continue operating. Other developers of third-party apps, including Reddit Is Fun, Sync, and ReddPlanet, have also said they will shut down.
Furthermore, some users of the platform have raised concerns about the changes, arguing that Reddit relies on volunteer moderators and uncompensated contributors to keep the platform welcoming and free of objectionable material. A post on r/pics titled Reddit is killing third-party apps (and itself) implores Reddit to listen to its moderators, contributors, and everyday users and to avoid sacrificing long-term viability for short-term profits.
The problem’s background has a secondary protagonist in the rise of artificial intelligence systems such as Chat GPT. Reddit creators stated earlier in April in an article published in The New York Times that they would start charging for the information that AI systems like Open AI obtain from their forums. Such chatbots are trained through the articles and comments that users share on the internet, and Reddit is one of the primary sources of this information. The information Reddit shares for free is highly valuable, and large companies like Microsoft or Google are profiting from it.
With these developments in mind, Reddit intends to close its API, which developers use to download platform information for their personal or commercial use. This move will be detrimental to moderators who need effective tools to combat spammers, bad actors, or the entities that enable them. It also threatens to reduce the site to another dead cog in the Ennui Engine. However, Reddit has not yet stated its final decision on this issue, and users remain nervous about the future of the forum.
