More Than 7K Subreddits Turn Private To Protest Increased API Pricing
In a shocking turn of events, Reddit has decided to implement its previously announced blackout. As a result, thousands of subreddits have gone private.
The reason behind this action has been to protest the decision of the platform to increase pricing to provide API access to users.
Consequently, this will lead to a number of third-party apps which support the Reddit experience shutting down. Not only will this harm the economy, but have an impact on how the app functions.
As per a live list, which was tracking the protest on Reddit, more than 7,000 subreddits are believed to have gone dark. Meanwhile, the total number of subreddits is around 100,000.
Despite the fact that 7% is a comparatively small number, these 7,000 communities have come together and gathered no less than 2.7 billion users combined.
As a result, Reddit is bound to suffer a lack of engagement, soon after it announced an increase in pricing for API access.
After this significant number of groups went dark, a lot of trouble was caused for Reddit. This came in the form of the website going through a brief outage.
On the other hand, the subreddits have said that they are going to remain inactive for an undefined period of time and protest over the change in prices for API.
In the last couple of days of the previous month, Reddit made an announcement saying that it will be raising the prices charged to grant users API access.
Consequently, this step was taken to make money off of well-known and big-name developers, who have been leveraging data collected from the platform in order to fuel the systems of their businesses.
In addition, a number of generative AI tools have been making use of data taken from Twitter and Reddit. This data forms one of the most important sources of input and helps build conversational models.
Then, these models are sold to customers who purchase from businesses developing AI generative tools. But while these businesses are able to rope in billions, Reddit and Twitter receive nothing.
Since most businesses were benefitting because of data collected from the micro-blogging website, Twitter took to raising the pricing of its API access in the month of March.
As a result, Reddit has now chosen to follow in the footsteps of Twitter and build a system that is more equitable and as compared to its API use.
Same as the change impacted third-party users on Twitter, it is likely to have a lasting effect on Reddit tools and clients as well. These are primarily used by people to access the platform.
Moreover, Apollo, a well-known reader app for Reddit has revealed that it will be closing down by the end of the month, because it cannot survive the pricing change.
As per the developer of Apollo, Christian Selig, June 30th will be the last day of operations for the company. He explained that conversations with Reddit have failed miserably, which is why the business will be going under.