If you try to visit Reddit, you’ll find that much of the platform’s community is private.
Over 8,000 subreddits, including popular subreddits such as r/gaming, r/funny, and r/aww, to protest the fees Reddit charges for third-party access to its APIs or application programming interfaces is making a leap to An API is basically software that allows applications to communicate with each other.
Some third-party apps, such as Apollo, use Reddit’s APIs to allow users to access the site through their own interfaces. An app designed for the iPhone, Apollo allows users to access, log in and post to Reddit just like they normally do through her website.
In a Reddit post, Apollo developer Christian Selig said that Reddit can be considered a bouncer. “Historically, you could ask Reddit, ‘Can you comment on this post? or “Can you list the posts on AskReddit?” Each of these he said is one API request, and Reddit will respond with the corresponding data,” he explained.
But some say Reddit’s new pricing model is financially unsustainable. According to Reddit, API access has been and will continue to be free under certain conditions, but you’ll have to pay for higher usage requirements. Effective July 1st, apps will be charged 24 cents per 1,000 API calls.
Selig announced Apollo. shutting down At the end of the month according to these price changes.
He said the new API model would ultimately cost more than $20 million a year. “This is not an exaggeration, it’s just the 7 billion requests Apollo made last month multiplied by the price per request,” he explained in a Reddit post.
In a Q&A post with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, commenters complained that their treatment of Reddit management and third-party developers was “unprofessional” and “hostile.”
A Reddit spokesperson said in response to Marketplace’s request for comment: We spend millions of dollars on hosting and Reddit needs to get paid fairly to continue supporting high-usage third-party apps. Our pricing is based on usage levels that we measure to be comparable to our own costs. “
The spokesperson also said that “the majority of API users don’t have to pay for access,” and that its API is free to moderator tools and bots, and that it “will remain public for as long as the app is active.” It can also be used for free, within rate limits. Not monetized. The New York Times also reported in April that researchers will continue to be able to use it for free.
Reddit’s move comes at a time when artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT (developed by OpenAI) that learn from data available online are gaining popularity. A third-party app used Reddit’s API to allow users to access his website, while some companies used his Reddit conversations to understand human language and We are developing a language model, a type of AI that can imitate human conversation.
The Times reported that Reddit posts are being used as “free educational material” by companies such as Google, Microsoft and OpenAI to develop AI systems.
In an interview with The Times, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman explained, “Reddit’s data corpus is truly priceless.”
“But you don’t have to give all of that value to the world’s biggest companies for free,” he continued.
Gee Lee, assistant professor of operations and information management practices at Babson College, said Reddit, which also plans to go public later this year, could come under pressure to diversify its revenue streams.
Other platforms have already determined limits for API access. Twitter recently blocked the use of its API by third parties. This means the end of third party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific.
Twitter has a subscription package that allows developers to access their APIs, but at a high cost. Wired reports that he ranges from $42,000 to $210,000 per month.
Even those willing to pay were shut out. OpenAI licensed Twitter data for $2 million a year, but Twitter CEO Elon Musk decided to ban OpenAI from accessing the data because he believed the company wasn’t paying enough. The Times reported that it did.
Developer Q&A site Stack Overflow also announced that it will charge AI developers access to their posts.
As the AI battle heats up, the price of data can get even more expensive.
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