Reddit’s plans to charge for access to the APIs have led many communities on the platform to protest: thousands of subreddits are closed and hidden, accessible only to members. The social network even had technical problems because of the demonstration.
On Monday morning (12), Reddit had stability issues. According to the platform’s status page, there has been a major disruption to desktop and mobile sites, as well as official apps.
A company spokesperson put the blame on the demonstration. “A significant number of subreddits switching to private mode caused some stability issues, which were expected,” said Tim Rathschmidt.
Billing displeases Reddit users
The change in Reddit’s policies for APIs was announced in April 2023. The platform will charge for access to the programming interface.
According to CEO Steve Huffman, the move is a way to protect the platform from artificial intelligence companies. They use the content of the forums to train their models and do not give any of it back to the community, the executive charges.
In practice, however, this has made it impossible for several independent apps used to access Reddit, such as Apollo, to work. Christian Selig, its developer, estimates he would have to spend $20 million to keep his product running.
These apps had a loyal audience, as the official tool displeases many users, for not having the same features as the site.
Subreddits go private in protest
To mark their opposition to the new measures, several subreddits — as the thematic communities within Reddit are called — have gone from being public to private.
About 7,000 subreddits are closed, according to the Verge. Thus, they are accessible only to members.
This is especially damaging to Reddit. A source of traffic relevant to the social network is Google. In fact, one way to discover real user reports or interesting discussions is to add “reddit” to a search. With the subreddits closed, the social network can’t take advantage of this advantage, and ends up having one less source of revenue.
Several forums said they would be private until June 14, which would total 48 hours. Even so, the situation is uncertain: some promise to stay closed until Reddit reviews the API charge. The changes take effect on June 30.
