Why are thousands of Reddit pages going dark for 48 hours?

World
By William

INTERPRETER

Some 7,000 Reddit communities, totaling hundreds of millions of subscribers, are protesting new API pricing changes that could kill third-party apps.

From June 12 to June 14, thousands of Reddit communities, known as subreddits, will go into the dark to protest planned API changes that would essentially kill many third-party applications.

Self proclaimed the “front page of the internet”, Reddit ranks among the top 20 most popular websites and has an estimated 430 million monthly active users.

Over the course of 48 hours, thousands of subreddits will be set to private mode by their moderators. Only members of the community approved by the moderators can view and participate in these channels. The pages are inaccessible to everyone else.

Some subreddits have said they will remain offline until the planned changes are reviewed or withdrawn.

What is an API and what does Reddit change?

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are considered the backbone of the modern web. Simply put, they allow two applications to communicate with each other, allowing developers to access data and build new features and functionality.

Like all other tech companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, Reddit has a public API that programmers can sign up for and use after agreeing to certain terms.

Until now, Reddit offered free access to its API. However, on April 18, the company announced that it was updating its API terms to charge developers for API access – a change that will take effect July 1, 2023.

Reddit’s decision comes months after Twitter announced it was suspending all third-party apps, forcing people to use the platform’s official app and website.

In an April interview with the New York Timessaid Reddit’s CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman that “more than any other place on the web, reddit is a home for authentic conversation.”

“Crawling Reddit, generating value, and not returning that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” continues Huffman.

Reddit offers a huge amount of text from different communities, making it valuable for building AI (artificial intelligence) language models, such as ChatGPT and Bard.

Large language models use a technique called deep learning to produce text that looks like it was created by a human. These models depend on large collections of text data for their training (Al Jazeera)

What do the changes mean for Reddit’s third-party apps?

Reddit has a large community of third-party application developers. These apps provide users with additional features and customizations beyond the official Reddit app or website.

Under the new conditions, applications with less than 100 queries per minute will remain free. This one, according to Huffmanaccounting for more than 90 percent of current applications.

Third party apps with higher API requests will be charged $0.24 for every 1000 requests.

One of the most popular third-party apps to shut down is Apollo, the popular iPhone and iPad app best known for its slick UI and custom themes.

According to Christian Selig, creator of the Apollo app, the new pricing would cost him $20 million a year to keep operating at its current 7 billion monthly requests.

On June 8, Selig tweeted that Apollo will close on June 30, saying, “Reddit’s recent decisions and actions have sadly made it impossible for Apollo to continue.”

Other well-known apps, including Reddit is Fun, Sync, and Reddplant, have also announced that they will be shutting down due to cost.

After an uproar among users, Huffman, who calls u/spez, defended the changes in an action-packed “Ask me everythingOpen forum on Friday. He said, “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining company, and to do that we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that need massive data usage.”

Despite widespread backlash, Huffman confirmed that the company has no plans to review upcoming API changes.

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Screenshot taken from r/iPhone currently set as private. (Al Jazeera)

Which subreddits are going dark?

Nearly 7,000 subreddits, some with tens of millions of subscribers, will be set to private by their moderators starting June 12. Some of the largest communities that are fading into the background are:

  • r/funny (49 million subscribers)
  • r/gaming (37 million)
  • r/aww (34 million)
  • r/earned today (31 million)
  • r/photos (30 million)
  • r/videos (26 million)
  • r/Music (23 million)
  • r/food (23 million)
  • r/Art (22 million)
  • r/gadgets (21 million)
  • r/sport (20 million)

Thousands of others subreddits have also signed up to join the protests.

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