A major protest began on Reddit in June, a sort of community strike, protesting the new fees imposed on third-party developers. For several days, almost all of Reddit became inaccessible. The moderators of more than 5,000 subreddits (out of 7,049 total) blacked out, making the subreddits they administer private and, therefore, unavailable to users.
This ‘strike‘ started on 12 June and went on for some time to the disinterest of most. The reason? Reddit is not Facebook, not for the larger audience. Yet, the platform is worth a lot and moves a lot of money. So much so that some very important subreddits with millions of users (such as r/Music, r/iPhone and others) have announced that the protest will be indefinite until Reddit’s administration goes back on its choices (or until it acts coercively to remove the mods and forcibly breaks the strike).
The reasons for this protest are partly justified and stem from the new prices for using APIs. This will lead to the closure of many third-party apps with which users consult the site. APIs (application programming interfaces) are tools provided by companies (in this case, Reddit) to developers to develop software that can communicate with the service (e.g., to access posts, comments, etc.). Therefore, an app remains a skeleton without content and access to APIs.
In the beginning was Apollo
The most talked-about affair in this regard was the one involving Apollo, the trendy iOS client for Reddit (also shown during Apple’s WWDC). Apollo’s developer Christian Selig went public and conducted a sort of public negotiation with the company. Selig recounted it in a detailed post on Reddit: with the new prices, he would have to pay around $12,000 for every 50 million calls to keep Apollo running.
Considering an average of 7 billion API calls per month, maintaining the most popular iOS client for Reddit would have cost over $20 million per year. This is a figure the independent developer obviously cannot afford. To give a comparison, Selig reported that 50 million calls to Imgur’s API cost him only $166 (as opposed to the $12,000 required by Reddit). For this reason, Selig announced that Apollo would close on 30 June. The same fate would befall other popular third-party apps, such as Reddit Is Fun, Sync and ReddPlanet. Other subreddits have gone public again on the platform, while some have remained private. Reddit says they will be permanently removed if they do not return to public view.
Reddit has repeatedly tried to justify its decision, explaining the need to monetize more to bear the costs of maintenance and specifying that the API will remain accessible for free apps that do not require payment by users, as well as for bots and official tools used by community moderators. Furthermore, in announcing the new pricing policies, Reddit explained that researchers, academics, and others use the site’s APIs to access and analyze millions of conversations between humans. At first, industry experts believed that the new policies were designed to monetize artificial intelligence training with the enormous number of conversations on Reddit.
The Reddit protest: A steep price to pay
However, a substantial proportion of users have reacted very badly to the new pricing policy: many users consult Reddit exclusively via third-party apps, which often have exclusive functions not available in the official app (which, by the way, only arrived in 2016). Moreover, among the additional tools provided by third-party apps are often tools dedicated to moderators, the disappearance of which would make life much more complicated for community administrators. Moderating a subreddit with millions of active users is a considerable (but unpaid) commitment, which in many cases would become even more demanding without the tools offered by third-party apps.
We do not know how this story will end: if you want to learn more about the demands of the many moderators leading the protest, we refer you to this open letter in which the moderators explain their points of view. The tug-of-war could be very tough: if, on the one hand, the company has amply demonstrated that it has no intention of backtracking. On the other hand, Reddit is a very peculiar social network, which would have a lot to lose if the communities of millions of users that have been created in the subreddits decided to move to other platforms.
