Rest In Peace, Reddit, Killed By Greed

By Petr Navovy | reddit | June 30, 2023 |

By Petr Navovy | reddit | June 30, 2023 |

‘Reddit is killing third-party apps, and itself’ is a refrain you will have seen all over the site over the past few weeks.

For about seven years, Reddit has kept its API access free of charge, but now, following in the footsteps of Elon Musk-owned Twitter, the site will begin charging ludicrous amounts for API access, in effect putting third-party apps like Apollo and Reddit Is Fun into an entirely nonviable position. Charging $12,000 for every 50 million data access requests, Reddit would be asking Apollo (which makes something like 7 billion requests per month) to pay $1.7 million per month — that’s $20 million per year. For context, Apollo pays $166 for every 50 million API requests to Imgur. Apollo is maintained by a single developer. There are other changes bundled into Reddit’s plan, including blocking ads in third-party apps — naturally depriving them of revenue and forcing them to consider a paid subscription model.

In response, the community had been taking a number of steps to try to change the death march, including over 8,000 subreddits going on a 48-hour ‘going private’ blackout on June 12th, and many other subreddits making all of their content ‘not safe for work’ (NSFW) in various ways (adding needless rude words into post titles, for example). A number of subreddits continued the blackout past the planned 48-hour window. None of this has worked. In response, Reddit threatened to remove moderator status from the mods of those subreddits taking part in the extended blackout.

As of today, June 30th, both Apollo and Reddit Is Fun will be shutting down. It’s the end of an era. Reddit’s first-party app is notoriously terrible, and many users rely on actually well-developed apps for their Reddit fix. Reddit Is Fun has been my one and only method of regularly browsing Reddit since I first started properly spending time on the site in the early 2010s.

So, why is Reddit doing this now?

Well,

1) Reddit is planning to go public soon.

2) The surge of AI-and specifically Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Bard which feed on content hosted on sites like Reddit through API access, and Reddit wants to get paid for this.

(Header pic of former, not current, Reddit CEO Alexis Ohanian with Serena Williams, who he is married to, as finding interesting pictures linked to Reddit is a challenge)