More than 7,000 communities within Reddit, also known as subreddits, have gone private – either for 48 hours or for an indefinite period – to protest changes planned towards the pricing of its application programming interface (API).

The subreddit protests follow an announcement by Reddit in April that it would be charging about $0.24 for every 1,000 API calls or approximately under $1 per user every month.

The protest action by the subreddits started on Monday, June 12, and is likely to affect many Reddit users. Some subreddits, such as r/Music, r/gaming, and r/science have millions of subscribers, so the impact of a short-term or, in the case of some subreddits, an indefinite shutdown is palpable.

API changes spark protest

The API changes include charging developers to access the API and make API calls to request information for app users.

According to a Reuters report, the move to charge for the API calls is partly due to generative AI, as subreddits have a lot of data that could potentially make training tools like ChatGPT easier. Thus, using Reddit’s API for that purpose would allow AI companies to directly find and collate data for training purposes.

Reuters added that Steve Huffman, Reddit’s CEO, said in an interview with the New York Times in April the “Reddit corpus of data is really valuable.” Huffman does not want to “need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

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One third-party app developer – Christian Selig of Apollo – says it would cost about $20 million a year to keep running, based on the pricing details given out. Apollo users made some 7 billion API calls in a month on the app.

As a result of the API pricing changes, Selig said he would shut down Apollo on June 30. Other third-party app developers have followed suit with similar announcements as they cannot afford the costs.

This would leave Reddit’s own application as the beneficiary of such a shutdown, but with many caveats besides.

Affecting communities at large

Some of those affected by the shutdown of third-party apps include the volunteer moderators who use third-party apps to make it easier for them to moderate the communities they manage, as well as those with physical handicaps who use third-party apps for more reliable access.

According to a post on r/save3rdpartyapps, the shutdown of such apps would force them to use an inferior app – Reddit’s own first-party application – that doesn’t have the same accessibility features other apps provided.

“We were assured that this decision’s damage to handicap accessibility was an unintended side effect- though not given an actual apology for it – and told that ‘non-commercial, accessibility-focused apps and tools will continue to have free access’. This neatly omits the fact that many of Reddit’s disabled users depend on the accessibility features of apps which are not specifically ‘accessibility-focused’, but still have superior accessibility features to the official app – many of which have already announced their shutdown,” the post notes.

“I really hope Reddit listens,” Selig wrote on a post thanking people for supporting the Reddit blackout.

“I think showing humanity through apologizing for and recognizing that this process was handled poorly, and concrete promises to give developers more time, would go a long way to making people feel heard and instilling community confidence,” he added. – Rappler.com