Subreddits Will Go Dark On Monday In Protest To Administration
As of Monday 12th June, thousands of Reddit communities will go private rendering them inaccessible for 48 hours. This is an organized protest by users regarding how the platform is being run.
According to Verge, over 100 subreddits including r/iPhone and r/unexpected, have already closed their doors in anticipation of the strike. The protest is supposed to be followed by over 3,500 subreddit communities including r/todayilearned, r/funny, and r/gaming, with more than 30 million subscribers each.
So, why are Reddit communities protesting? Talk of these protests began with the announcement of API changes. These changes will cause many third-party applications-which are used to browse the social media platform to shut down.
These platforms include Apollo and Rif is fun for Reddit. The said changes will introduce huge charges for “premium access” to the platform.
Therefore, these third-party apps would need to charge about $5 (£4) a user each month simply to pay the new fees to Reddit. This price is an estimation made by Apollo’s sole developer, Christian Selig.
With talk of the strike and boycotts heating up, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman hosted a promised AMA to address the API changes. However, his comments did not offer hope for the Reddit faithful.
“Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use,” he said.
Huffman’s stance was met with seemingly universal anger with some users on the platform calling him a coward.
Why Is Reddit Introducing The API Changes?
Reddit’s new changes come at a time when the platform is in desperate need of monetization. Reddit does not charge any hosting fees for people to set up their own communities.
Before the introduction of the API changes, the company also did not charge third-party applications for Access to data on the site. Therefore, AI companies like ChatGPT have been able to scrape data off the system to train their AI models.
Therefore, the introduction of these API changes is supposed to allow the company to monetize and control the valuable data that they possess.
CEO Steve Huffman said, “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable. But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
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Bookstore
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