Thousands of popular Reddit communities have initiated a strike, protesting the platform’s decision to monetize access to its data. On June 12th, more than 300 subreddits went private, including well-known forums such as r/funny, r/gaming, and r/todayilearned. The strike, which is expected to last for at least 48 hours, is a response to proposed charges for third-party app developers.
Redditors argue that these changes will make the social media page inaccessible to a significant portion of its user base, hoping their organized effort will prevent the implementation of the new pricing.
The controversy arises from the fact that Reddit, which was launched in 2005, only developed its own app in 2016. This led to the rise in popularity of third-party apps as a means to access the site. However, accessing the site’s information through these apps requires the use of an Application Programming Interface (API), which will now come with substantial charges.
These upcoming changes are expected to adversely affect third-party Reddit apps like Apollo, which estimates it would need to charge users $5 per month to cover the new fees imposed by Reddit.
Apollo, a popular third-party app, has been particularly vocal about the issue, stating that Reddit’s pricing is comparable to Twitter’s, and continuing to operate under the new charges would require paying Reddit $20 million per year. As a result, Apollo announced that it will shut down on June 30th due to Reddit’s recent decisions. Reddit’s co-founder, Steve Huffman, defended the changes, emphasizing the need for the platform to become financially sustainable and no longer subsidize commercial entities that heavily rely on data usage.
Huffman also criticized AI companies like OpenAI for freely scraping large amounts of Reddit data, stating that the platform’s valuable data should not be given away to the world’s largest companies for free.
While Reddit hopes to establish itself as a self-sustaining business, analysts indicate that the company’s current worth falls short of its desired $15 billion valuation. In contrast, OpenAI’s valuation is estimated to have reached $29 billion in January 2023.
The clash over monetization highlights the challenges Reddit faces in balancing financial viability with user expectations and the use of its valuable data.
