Reddit hit by protests! Check out the 'killer' reason and much more | Explainer

Thousands of subreddits are going private in order to protest against Reddit’s new API pricing policy. Know what exactly is happening on this lively platform.

Know everything that’s happening with Reddit. (Bloomberg)

Reddit, the popular online discussion forum is facing major protests from its users, moderators, and third-party apps. Yesterday, thousands of subreddits went private as a part of their 48 hours long protest against the company's new API pricing policy. Reddit even suffered a massive outage on Monday after so many subreddits went dark. Even now, Reddit is struggling with frustrated users as most of the popular communities are not accessible to them. But what has prompted Reddit users and moderators to take such drastic measures and what exactly is this new API pricing policy that has been called a “third-party app killer”? Let us take a look.

What made the subreddits go dark?

On April 18, 2023, Reddit announced that it would start charging third parties for its application programming interface (API) - a software framework that allows a data provider and an end-user to communicate with each other. The company plans to introduce it starting July 1.

As a result, Reddit will charge developers that require higher usage limits $0.24 for every 1,000 API requests. Apollo, a third-party Reddit app for iOS, said that with their current usage, the charges would cost more than $20 million a year.

Why is Reddit making a change to its API policy?

According to Reddit, one of the main reasons is generative AI. The platform's conversation forums have a lot of data that can be used to train tools such as ChatGPT, the viral chatbot from Microsoft-backed OpenAI. While some of this data can be collected in an unstructured fashion, Reddit's API makes it easier for companies to directly find and collate the data.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an interview with the New York Times in April that the "Reddit corpus of data is really valuable" and he doesn't want to "need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free."

When will the subreddit blackout end and who is being affected?

Thousands of subreddits - the forums dedicated to a specific topic on Reddit - are protesting the move and most of their moderators have planned a 48-hour blackout during which the pages will go private, meaning millions of users will be left without access.

Subreddits such as r/Music, r/gaming, r/science and r/todayilearned - all with more than 30 million subscribers - are participating. Some like r/Music plan to protest indefinitely.

Unlike most other social media platforms, Reddit is heavily dependent on community moderators, "or mods", who police their subreddits for free to weed out offensive or illegal content.

Will Reddit change its policy?

Huffman on Friday noted the frustration among many moderators of Reddit communities but said the company can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use as it needs to be a "self-sustaining business".