Reddit is in revolt. Or rather, Reddit’s users—the service’s flesh and blood—are rising up against the company that runs the show.
Today and tomorrow, thousands of subreddits, the individual communities that make up the whole, are “going dark” to protest against Reddit management’s decisions and perceived failures. The moderators of some subreddits, including the wildly popular r/music, r/videos, and r/iphone communities, say they will stay dark for longer.
The biggest issue is Reddit’s decision to charge for access to its application programming interface, or API—the tool it provides so outside services can tap into its data and provide alternative front ends to Reddit. When CEO Steve Huffman announced this change in April, he indicated he wanted to stop the likes of Google and OpenAI from continuing to use Reddit data to train their A.I. models. More recently, management’s line is that charging a fee for API access will allow Reddit to keep offering its services for free, and to turn the site into a “self-sustaining business.”
Last week, the sole developer of the popular third-party Reddit client Apollo called it quits. Apollo creator Christian Selig said the client would shutter at the end of this month because he had realized through discussions with Reddit that his API fees would amount to $20 million a year. (Selig also said Huffman falsely told others he was trying to “blackmail” and “threaten” Reddit; for the details of that ugly back-and-forth, which seems to involve some serious misunderstandings, read Selig’s post, which comes with recordings.)
The protests are also targeting Huffman’s decision to limit access to Reddit’s not-safe-for-work content via the API—he claimed this is “part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails to how explicit content and communities on Reddit are discovered and viewed”—as well as Reddit’s ongoing failure to make its official app accessible to blind and visually impaired users, who have to use third-party apps that now face an uncertain future because of the new API fees.
Huffman tried to calm everyone down a couple days ago with an explanatory post and AMA session, but got only anger in response, with moderators complaining that the API changes would kill off the third-party tools they use to moderate their subreddits. “If Reddit doesn’t somehow replace these tools or give me other strong support quickly, AMAs on these subreddits will suffer or even die, and I’ll be left feeling like Reddit does not care or in fact was malicious, since they took away very helpful things that previously existed,” read one of the more polite comments.
Huffman’s API decision followed a similar call by Elon Musk’s Twitter earlier this year, though Musk went further by outright banning third-party Twitter clients. Twitter’s introduction of a hefty API fee also elicited outrage from researchers and some power users, but little of that bled through to the average user, and in any case, everyone knows Twitter is Musk’s plaything. The same cannot be said for Huffman and Reddit, which is run by volunteer mods who control much of the user experience. And those mods are showing their considerable power right now, with more than 6,000 subs being set to “private” and shutting out their users today.
Huffman, one of Reddit’s cofounders and its CEO for the past eight years, is in a very difficult position now as there’s little he can do about the protest, and he himself is the primary focus of users’ anger. He’s expected to lead Reddit into an IPO later this year—there’s a reason he’s desperately trying to make the company profitable—but, at this point, it’s hard to predict if Reddit will be the same service, with the same leadership, by then.
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David Meyer
Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman.
