Reddit users were barred from accessing the popular subreddit on Monday after the community protested the platform’s data access plans.
Thousands of popular Reddit communities that specialize in a wide range of topics, from Apple Inc to gaming and music, locked out users Monday in protest against the company’s plans to charge for access to its data.
Starting next month, third-party app developers that make use of Reddit’s trove of data will have to pay a price, and the change will affect everyone from well-funded companies like OpenAI to smaller developers. It can affect players in the field.
The Apollo app, popular among Redditors as an alternative interface to the official platform, says exorbitant fees have made it “impossible” to continue offering its services.
Here are some facts about the protests.
What triggered the blackout?
The effort comes weeks after Reddit announced in April that it would start charging third parties for application programming interfaces (APIs), software frameworks that allow data providers and end users to communicate with each other. has progressed throughout.
Starting July 1st, Reddit will charge developers who want higher usage limits $0.24 (€0.22) per 1,000 API calls or less than $1 (€0.93) per user per month It’s a schedule.
Apollo said current usage would cost more than $20 million a year.
Why did Reddit make the change?
One of the reasons is generative AI.
Reddit’s conversational forums have a wealth of data that can be used to train tools such as ChatGPT, an OpenAI viral chatbot backed by Microsoft. Some of this data may be collected in an unstructured manner, but Reddit’s API makes it easier for companies to search and collate the data directly.
“Reddit’s data corpus is truly priceless,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an April interview with The New York Times. We don’t have to give it to the department,” he said. For free”.
Who will be affected? When will the Reddit blackout end?
Thousands of subreddits (forums dedicated to specific topics on reddits) have protested the move, with most of their moderators planning a 48-hour blackout during which pages would be unlisted, and several Millions of users will lose access.
Subreddits such as r/Music, r/gaming, r/science and r/todayilarned all have over 30 million subscribers and are participating. People like r/Music are planning indefinite protests.
Unlike most other social media platforms, Reddit relies heavily on community moderators, or “mods,” who monitor subreddits for free to remove offensive or illegal content.
What are third-party app developers saying?
Reddit’s Apollo app creator Christian Selig tweeted last week that the service will be shutting down on June 30th.
Huffman said other third-party apps such as Reddit is Fun and Sync have also determined that the new pricing “won’t work for their business and will end before the pricing takes effect.”
what is reddit saying?
Huffman noted on Friday that many of the moderators in the Reddit community were displeased that the company needed to be a “self-sustaining business,” so it didn’t allow commercial entities with data usage needs at scale. He said he could no longer provide subsidies.
What are other social media companies doing?
Elon Musk’s Twitter in January restricted all third-party clients and apps and updated rules for developers accessing its API.
The new rules say developers cannot use the company’s API to create “alternative or similar services or products for the Twitter application.”
