The two-day Reddit protest will continue indefinitely, with the website’s volunteer moderators saying they will maintain a blackout of the social media site until its owners back down from new user charges.
The two-day Reddit protest will continue indefinitely, with the website’s volunteer moderators saying they will maintain a blackout of the social media site until its owners back down from new user charges.
As of Wednesday, more than 5,000 popular subreddits remained in private mode.
The crackdown has been underway for weeks after Reddit announced in April that it would begin charging third parties for its application programming interfaces (APIs).
An API is a way for multiple computer programs to communicate with each other, and third parties used Reddit’s free API to access data or build apps.
But now, Reddit has proposed charging developers who require higher usage limits.
Some of the most popular apps, including Apollo and RIF, have said they will have to shut down because of the new charges.
Organizers of the blackout that began Monday say Reddit’s changes threaten to eliminate key ways the platform has historically been optimized.
Subreddit “mods” often use tools outside the official app to keep their forums free of spam and hateful content, for example, as well as improve accessibility.
One reason for the new charge is the rise of generative AI. Reddit’s conversation forums contain a lot of data that can be used to train tools like ChatGPT.
While some of this data may be collected in an unstructured manner, Reddit’s API makes it easy for companies to find and compare data directly.
Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman said in a leaked memo, “We should have done exactly what we said”. published by The Verge,
Huffman also reportedly claimed that the subreddits would likely end their protest after the initial two days.
Why are moderators continuing with the Reddit blackout?
Many moderators on Reddit are unpaid volunteers, and they are claiming that the company’s admins are removing moderators who are supporting the protest in order to bring the subreddit back online.
A moderator of r/gaming also pointed out Independent This stance was a response to Huffman’s claim that the protests “shall pass”.
Reddit has approximately 57 million daily users and 100,000 communities. There are also about 13 billion posts in existence on the site.
Despite these impressive figures and a reported $100 million (€92 million) in advertising revenue in 2019, the company is not profitable.
This latest move, like Elon Musk’s third-party restrictions on Twitter, is hoping to change that.
In an April announcement, Reddit said the API changes would “support a more sustainable, healthy ecosystem around Reddit data.”
What will happen next?
No one is entirely sure at this stage what will happen next.
The Reddit stand-off has become a battle of wills between moderators and business owners.
As of now, it seems that only time will tell who will be the first to retreat. Euronews has contacted Reddit for a response to the protest.
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