Reddit communities boycott forum site over API changes
More than 7,600 communities, or subreddits, have gone dark to protest Reddit’s plan to start charging third parties for access to the site’s data.
Some subreddits have been set to private by their individual moderators to protest the changes, while others became temporarily closed for new posts or edits. The blackout is set to run from 12 to 14 June, though a number of subreddits are planning to protest for longer, according to site Save 3rd Party Apps.
Save 3rd Party Apps details the particulars of the boycott and is also tracking the participation status of Reddit’s 250 largest communities. At the time of writing, 204 of the subreddits have gone dark.
“A recent Reddit policy change threatens to kill many beloved third-party mobile apps, making a great many quality-of-life features not seen in the official mobile app permanently inaccessible to users,” the site read.
“Even if you’re not a mobile user and don’t use any of those apps, this is a step toward killing other ways of customising Reddit, such as Reddit Enhancement Suite or the use of the old.reddit.com desktop interface.
“This isn’t only a problem on the user level: many subreddit moderators depend on tools only available outside the official app to keep their communities on-topic and spam-free.”
Reddit in April announced it would start charging third parties for access to its application programming interface (API). It is asking developers to pay US$0.24 for every 1000 API calls or less than $1 per user per month.
In an update from last week, a Reddit spokesperson said: “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.”
Some of the third party developers set to be impacted range from larger firms like OpenAI to small developers that offer a different user experience, like the popular app Apollo.
In Apollo’s own r/apolloapp subreddit, the app’s developer estimated that the changes would cost them some US$20 million per year.
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