Today is The day the internet dreaded.
Perhaps it wasn’t the active terror, the doomsday that everyone knew was coming, but it was still a terror that seemed nearly inevitable. Reddit’s magic is gone. As of today, June 30, 2023, several mobile apps for browsing the platform are being discontinued ahead of Reddit’s new initiative to charge for access to its APIs. This is the culmination of weeks of insurrection from upset users and mods that this move will pay a price to a third-party developer responsible for an app that helps bring the community to life. Even if that decision was eventually reversed, it was a moment that changed Reddit culture forever. And with it, it transformed the Internet.
All of this might sound like we’re very concerned about destabilizing issues like API changes, but that’s not the case. This marks a newfound awareness of what labor on the Internet is and how communities can mine their creations for money-making undertakings. Specifically, it uses artificial intelligence.
When the company announced the API changes in April, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said: new york times One of the main reasons for the move was that it would force companies using Reddit’s archives for AI training to pay. “Reddit’s data he corpus is really priceless,” Huffman says. “But you don’t have to give all of that value to the world’s biggest companies for free.”
But charging for APIs doesn’t just affect companies that use Reddit discussions to train artificial intelligence systems, such as OpenAI and Google. After the company announced the change, popular Reddit apps such as Apollo and Reddit Is Fun announced they would be shutting down instead of paying for it, but Apollo developer Christian Selig said it would make about $20 million a year. I had estimated that it would cost a dollar.
To protest Reddit’s decision, some 9,000 subreddit mods switched their groups to private earlier this month, dampening conversations on the site and affecting Google search results. In a leaked memo to employees, Hoffman said the ruckus would “disappear”, but Rory Mir, associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said my colleague Boone Ashworth As I told him, it would be like breaking the platform. “Like Twitter, when social media websites start to die, it won’t be a major collapse, but it will slowly decline unless they change course,” Mir said.
And just like Twitter, this is a shift that will make users realize the value they’re giving tech companies for free, even if it’s meant to serve the community. A poster for a subreddit dedicated to storing third-party apps succinctly explained what it was about: We, users, are nothing but Reddit. [Hoffman’s] digital dollhouse. (Disclosure: WIRED is a Condé Nast publication. Reddit is owned by Condé Nast’s parent company Advance His Publications.)
