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Vladimir Myronenko
On Monday, June 12, more than 3000 communities of the Reddit platform became “private” and closed public access to content for 48 hours in protest against the plans of the site management to charge third-party companies and developers for access to data and use of the API service.
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A number of forums such as r/todayilearned, r/funny, and r/gaming, each with over 30 million subscribers, have announced in advance their decision to take part in the protest, while other forums with over 1 million members, including r/iPhone and r/unexpected had already closed access to their messages a few days before it started.
In a group statement, the moderators of the communities that joined the protest said: “On June 22, many subreddits will go offline to protest this policy. Some will return after 48 hours, others will disappear forever if the issue is not properly resolved as many moderators cannot do their job with the bad tools available through the official app.”
The outcry stems from upcoming changes to the site’s API, which would require third parties to pay huge sums to be able to display Reddit information in their apps and services. For popular third-party applications like Apollo, which allows users to view a site with a custom interface, this can be a disaster. According to Apollo developer Christian Selig, such apps would have to charge each user about $5 per month just to pay Reddit fees.
“Called Reddit to discuss prices, — informed developer of the Apollo application. — The bad news for third-party apps is that its advertised prices are close to those of Twitter, and Apollo will have to pay Reddit $20 million a year to keep running.”
On the other hand, the Reddit leadership’s decision is understandable. The fact is that AI companies like OpenAI have taken advantage of Reddit’s massive amounts of data to train their systems for next to nothing without paying the social network a cent. “The Reddit data set is really valuable, Steve Huffman, founder and CEO of Reddit, told the New York Times in April. — But we don’t have to give all that value away to some of the biggest companies in the world for free.”
2023-06-12 09:01:00
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