Why are Thousands of Subreddits Shutting Down?

On Monday, numerous well-liked Reddit communities, covering a wide range of topics such as Apple Inc, gaming, and music, prevented their users from accessing their content as a form of protest against the company’s intention to impose fees for accessing its data.

Starting next month, third-party app developers who use Reddit’s massive databases will have to pay the price, and the changes could affect players everywhere — from deeper-pocketed companies like OpenAI to small developers.

The Apollo app, popular among Redditors for its alternative interface to the official platform, has said that exorbitant fees have made it impossible to continue offering the service.

Here are some facts about the demonstration:

What caused the power outage?

The move has been in the works for weeks after Reddit announced in April that it would begin charging third parties for its application programming interface (API) — the software framework that allows data providers and end users to communicate with each other.

Starting July 1, Reddit plans to charge developers who require higher usage limits $0.24 for every 1,000 API calls, or less than $1 per user per month

Apollo said that at their current usage, the fees would cost more than $20 million a year.

Why is Reddit making the change?

One of the reasons is generative artificial intelligence.

Reddit’s discussion forums have a lot of information that can be used to train tools like ChatGPT, a Microsoft-backed OpenAI viral chatbot. While some of this data may be collected in an unstructured way, Reddit’s API makes it easy to find and connect businesses directly.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an interview with the New York Times in April that “Reddit data is really valuable” and he doesn’t “need to give all that value to some of the biggest companies in the world for free.”

Who is affected and when will the Reddit blackout end?

Thousands of subreddits – forums devoted to a specific Reddit topic – are resisting the change, and most of their moderators have planned a 48-hour blackout during which the pages will go private, meaning millions of users will be without access.

Subreddits such as r/Music, r/gaming, r/science and r/todayilearned – all with over 30 million subscribers – participate. Some people who like r/Music are going to protest indefinitely.

Unlike most other social media platforms, Reddit relies heavily on community moderators, “or mods,” who moderate their subreddits for free to weed out offensive or illegal content.

What are third-party app developers saying?

Christian Selig, creator of Reddit’s Apollo app, tweeted last week that the service will be shut down on June 30.

Huffman has said that other third-party apps, such as Reddit is Fun and Sync, have also decided that the new pricing “doesn’t work for their businesses and will shut down before the pricing takes effect.”

What does reddit say?

Huffman noted the frustration among many Reddit community moderators on Friday, but said the company can no longer support commercial entities that require large-scale data usage because it needs to be a “self-sustaining business.”

What are other social media companies doing?

In January, Elon Musk’s Twitter restricted all third-party clients and apps and updated its rules for developers using its APIs.

Under the new rules, developers cannot use the company’s API to create a “substitute or equivalent service or product for the Twitter app.”