[Reddit Logo. Photo Credit to Pixabay]

Reddit, one of the largest online communities in the world, has faced controversy as the announcement of charging for its application programming interface (API) has sparked a revolt among its users.

Reddit’s new API policy changes will significantly impact third-party applications, causing its developers to pay an unaffordable price to continue providing their service.

The change also impacts many moderators of subreddits, the message boards that discuss a specific topic and rely on third-party apps to regulate posts and comments to save time and make the user experience more convenient.

Third-party Reddit clients such as Apollo, for example, allow users to use Reddit without relying on their official website or their mobile app shutting down. 

Christian Selig, the developer of Apollo, had expressed frustration on Reddit’s new API pricing, saying, “Going from a free API for eight years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days.”

In response to the new Reddit API changes, several Redditors have organized a protest to reverse these changes, resulting in many subreddits shut down from June 12 to June 14. 

During the blackout, over 7,000 subreddits have gone private, and some subreddits have protested in many forms, namely encouraging users to post unrelated topics or restricting new posts.

Reddit’s CEO, however, told the employees that “like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well” in a leaked internal memo, only fueling protests to stretch further and upsetting Redditors.

In an attempt to crush the protests, Reddit threatened moderators of subreddits that went private to reopen or face replacement with new moderators, which caused several subreddits to reopen.

Still, reopened subreddits have continued to protest in alternate methods, such as flooding the subreddit with pictures of comedian Mr. Oliver to mock the Reddit CEO for the change.

Meanwhile, Reddit argued that they do not desire to give free API access to tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI, which had recently been using Reddit conversations as a source to develop their AI systems.

Tech companies using Reddit to develop AI systems may potentially create competition with Reddit and threaten Reddit’s business by creating a similar app to Reddit.

With Reddit’s user base rapidly growing worldwide at approximately 55.79 million daily active users, the data that could be sourced from its network is massive.

Since the data inside the Reddit conversations are viewed as a valuable asset with multiple potential uses, it is no wonder Reddit tries to monopolize these lucrative resources.

The competition to create a chatbot similar to ChatGPT has been intensifying recently between the big tech companies as AI has gained popularity.

The AI industry has been gaining considerable demand to improve its algorithm, and data from large databases like Reddit is essential to advance their development.

However, the fact that the new API pricing policy would destroy third-party apps that many users have been using to improve their community may outweigh the benefits that Reddit brings with its change to the business model.