Reddit faces backlash as thousands of communities ‘black out’ over new API pricing

Registering their protest against Reddit’s plans to charge third-party apps for accessing its data, over 7,000 communities on the platform ‘blacked out’. These subreddits, as they are commonly referred to, locked their users out on Monday for 48 hours. Reddit also stopped working for a lot of users from around the world.

The controversy stems from Reddit's announcement in April, which outlined changes to its terms of developer tools and services. The platform said that it would be charging third-party apps for its application interface programming (APIs). The Reddit APIs offer access to its data for third-party apps to build user utilities, research, and games. Effective July 1, the updated rules would require third-party apps to pay approximately $1 per user per month for API access.

Earlier in an interview with The New York Times, Steve Huffman, Reddit founder and chief executive officer said that the platform’s data corpus is really valuable to be given for free to some of the largest companies. Notably, a lot of artificial intelligence systems and tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard have been built on publicly available data corpus, including that from Reddit.

The introduction of API pricing by Reddit sparked concerns among app developers who rely on the platform's data. Christian Selig, the developer of iOS Reddit client Apollo said that it might put him out of business. On June 8, he tweeted that Apollo will close down by the month’s end. “Apollo will close down on June 30th. Reddit’s recent decisions and actions have unfortunately made it impossible for Apollo to continue. Thank you so, so much for all the support over the years,” he tweeted. Not just Apollo, apps like ReddPlanet, Sync, and rif announced that they would be shutting down by June 30.

Like Reddit, microblogging website Twitter rolled out three levels of API access in March – free, basic, and enterprise. Twitter too attracted a lot of criticism amid its decision to restrict free access to its API.