Reddit has become a sort of staple of the internet. Parts of it are pleasant, places you could go to for advice, or to find other people with the same hobbies. Others are full of vitriol, arguments, and even hate speech. It all depends on what “subreddit” you land on. Think of it like message boards, only with a general feed where you can get updates from all of your communities, or even just the most popular posts of the day from most of those communities. It’s an addictive site, like Facebook or any other, where conflicts keep people coming back to argue, but helpful advice and friendly discussions draw in plenty of users. A popular search technique is to add “Reddit” to the end of a search phrase to find a thread with advice on your question from highly specified communities.
All of that may have fallen apart. Reddit’s leadership made a decision that upset everyone across the site. From the far-right to the far-left, the hobbyists to the porn enthusiasts. Everyone seems to hate one man: Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit (aka: “spez“). But does he deserve such ire? What did he do? The answer to that explains why many parts of Reddit “went dark” today as part of a planned blackout, users have deleted their content, and your search results with “Reddit” at the end are just a bit less useful now.
Reddit announced predatory API pricing and gave developers only a month to change their apps. Most have thrown in the towel. Popular third party apps like Apollo and RIF is Fun for Reddit are shutting down, and users, moderators, and developers are pissed.
It’s rare to see something that everyone on Reddit agrees on, but there’s finally something: Reddit is broken, and Huffman broke it.
Are they right?
In This Article:
What is an API?
Okay, if you’re not a developer, you may need some explanation here. API stands for “Application Programming Interface.” An API is basically a tool for accessing a service. Think of it like a form you might fill out at a doctor’s office. You fill out your information, what you’re there for, and your payment information, and the doctor gives you information about your health. An API for Reddit, for example, might ask what data the user wants, like the homepage, which would return a list of links and preview images for those threads. Or comments in those threads. Number of upvotes or downvotes, messages, etc. Basically, an API request is a request for data. You provide what the API needs to know to get you the right data, and it tells you information from its servers.
APIs allow companies to open up their data to their own apps or third party apps. It allows people to create a front end interface, like an app or website, that accesses the raw data. They require keys to use, so people can only request the data they’re approved for, and so the server can track how many requests someone might be making. An API request is a request for data, and the response is that data, if the requester is allowed to see it.
The Reddit API
Reddit’s API has been free. Well, free for developers. Reddit’s been subsidizing the cost, server costs aren’t free. It wasn’t perfect, some features, like chat, were still left only to the Reddit website or Reddit’s official app, but developers have been able to create versions of Reddit far superior to Reddit’s own offerings. They’ve been able to charge for their work, making money from Reddit’s API.
At least, that’s how Reddit puts it. Of course, these apps, which make Reddit a far more enjoyable experience, could also have drawn in users who never would have used Reddit at all. Some may have began using the website as well. That would lead them to the ads Reddit needs to make money. Though, they certainly weren’t making a profit. According to Reddit’s CEO, the company has never been profitable. Huffman was the CEO of Reddit from 2005 to 2009, and returned to the company in 2015, and has been running it ever since. If anyone knows about how unprofitable Reddit is, it’s the man who has ran the company for around 12 years.
Companies usually do charge for API access. These are sometimes subsidized with ads, with a separate delivery of an ad API, which developers can implement to ensure they get enough ad impressions for the API calls they’re making to pay for the main API. Others may choose to charge their users a subscription fee. Twitter clients did this for years before Twitter pushed them out by raising costs to use the API so dramatically it forced them out of the business. Twitter’s evaluation has plummeted, Musk’s own users voted him out of the role of CEO, and advertisers have left the platform. While not all tied to the API, the aggression towards Twitter’s most dedicated users was certainly part of its still ongoing downfall.
Surely another company wouldn’t make the same mistake.
A Drastic Change
Reddit made the same mistake. Christian Selig, developer of one of Reddit’s most popular third party apps, Apollo, said in January Reddit representatives told him that the API would not have any pricing changes in 2023, only improvements. However, a few months later, Reddit announced there would be pricing changes. They told developers they would have details in two to four weeks. Six weeks later, they finally gave developers those details: they’d have just one month to make drastic changes to their APIs and start charging users. Selig did the math, he’d have to cough up $20 million per year to keep Apollo running. With his userbase, most non-paying, that would be impossible. He’d have to charge users between $7.50 and $10 per month to keep his head above water. The current maximum Apollo subscription for all the premium features is just $1.50/month.
Apollo wasn’t alone. Every third party developer realized that, with the requests they make to the Reddit API, and the amount they charge or make from ads, often nothing or very little, they’d have to shut down. This included popular Android apps like RIF, Sync for Reddit, and many others.
What Reddit did was actually worse than Twitter. Twitter gave developers more than 30 days to make such dramatic changes to their apps. The pricing still killed the apps, but Reddit went for a much more efficient kill.
Why Now?
Like many problems that the web will experience over the next few years, this issue comes down to two things: AI and profit. Despite environmental concerns and concerns over racism, sexism, homophobia, and other biases entering AI, many companies and researchers have gone with the “Large Language Model” (LLM) approach of simply scraping large quantities of natural language from people, without curating that input. This is how you end up with chatbots that say racist things when prompted to “act like a Republican.” But we’re not here to talk about the obvious flaws in unmoderated LLMs. Companies know of these issues but don’t want to pay for the cost of curating language samples. Instead, we’re going to talk about where they’re scraping that data from. Free APIs.
Yeah, like Reddit’s.
LLM researchers used Reddit’s free API to scrape huge amounts of data from the service, at no cost to themselves. Reddit, however, was incurring the costs of this extreme server load. They wanted to reduce the requests from AI researchers, while also turning a profit from their data. Profitability is important to Reddit. The company has never been profitable, and is now trying to show a path towards profitability before their hopeful IPO later this year. Investors won’t be as enthusiastic about giving Reddit their money if they know the company will simply burn through it and never create a profit on its own.
However, Reddit’s plan to profit off of data usage falls apart if it’s too expensive to use.
Apollo, Others, Plan Shut Down
Apollo has become the biggest name in the protest against Reddit, through no intention of its creator. Selig simply did the math. He couldn’t afford the $20 million to keep Apollo running every year. It’s about $12,000 for 50 million requests, and his app makes billions of requests for its millions of users every year. If Reddit had been more flexible on the amount of time to implement changes and pricing, he could have kept Apollo alive. However, Reddit refused to budge even a little. Now, Selig has announced that Apollo would shut down on June 30th. Nearly every major third party app developer is doing the same. Yes, in just over two weeks, most Reddit apps will shut down.
If given the time to implement something, it’s possible Selig could have kept Apollo alive for its most hardcore users. However, with the current pricing, he would have had to charge anywhere between $7.50 and $10/month to keep the lights on. Between Reddit’s pricing, Apple’s cut of subscriptions, and his own labor, the subscription for running a Reddit app would be as high as a streaming service subscription. As one of the largest app developers, Reddit actually spoke with Selig at length, something smaller developers say the company hasn’t done. Still, despite these talks, Reddit refused to budge on pricing or timelines.
Selig, and many others, gave up.
A Disaster “Ask Me Anything”
Reddit has a long (and drama-filled) history with it’s “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) threads. AMA threads are a place for some notable figure to take questions from the public, in a sort of crowd-sourced Q&A session. Steve Huffman, username “spez” started one. It wasn’t pretty. Huffman only answered 14 questions, and with no real details. His comments had thousands of downvotes, people expressing their displeasure with his responses. In one particularly damning thread, Huffman answered a question about his past criticisms of Apollo developer Christian Selig. He previously made it seem as though Selig had “threatened” Reddit. Selig, in response, released call recordings proving that he had jokingly asked if Reddit would be interested in a $10 million buyout of Apollo, specifically pointed out that he was kidding, but that with a $20 million/year price tag, he’d have to shut down Apollo if they didn’t do something.
Huffman did not go into details in his answer, again stating that Selig would state things in calls and say something different in public. Selig himself asked for an example, which Huffman never responded to, likely because he’s learned that Selig has recordings of their conversations. If this kind of unprofessional bickering and finger pointing on Reddit’s end is indicative of any of Reddit’s communications with developers, it’s no wonder these talks have been unproductive.
Huffman did not answer follow-up questions. Many users, like those coming from the subreddit for the blind, r/blind, found his answers about accessibility-focused apps unsatisfactory. Reddit would allow accessibility apps to bypass API costs, since Reddit’s webpage and app are atrocious for users requiring accessibility features, but received no details on how this would work.
The Blackout
“A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue.”
– Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt to The Verge
As of this writing, 8,831 subreddits are blacked out in protest. This means they’re locked down and their content is unavailable. That’s representative of nearly 29,000 moderators and millions of users. Some subreddits, like r/funny, have over 40 million subscribers. Multiple subreddits in the blackout had over 30 million subscribers, each. There’s guaranteed overlap, but it’s certain that tens of millions of users lost access to their favorite content as a result of the blackout.
The movement was so large that all of the subreddits blacking out their content actually caused Reddit to go down for three hours at the beginning of the protest. Reddit was entirely unprepared for the impact the protest would have, and continues to underestimate it. Huffman claims it’ll blow over. However, Reddit’s most active users rely on third party apps. Mods, volunteers who ensure users follow subreddit guidelines, almost always use third party apps to do their jobs. These are the content creators that drive Reddit. Without them, the platform will surely collapse.
Many subreddits will be back online tomorrow. However, others have promised an indefinite blackout until Reddit makes changes. Just what are they demanding? As it turns out, not very much.
The Demands
You could find a list of demands for the blackout here. It’s short, but I can paraphrase:
- Technical API Changes
- Allow third party apps to run ads. These could come from Reddit or be self hosted with a revenue split model, meaning Reddit, like Apple, gets a portion of any profits.
- Reduce the API pricing to make the API cover costs so additional revenue sources can cover profit. This would enable subscription tiers (like an ad-free tier), and be reasonable enough that large developers could charge their users a fair price
- Give developers more time to make changes
- Continue to improve the API
- Accessibility Demands
- Users have had no communication and neither have developers. They don’t know what requirements an accessibility app will have to get an exception, and nothing is in writing.
- r/blind has made a list of accessible apps, including Apollo, which is not on the list. This is because the exception is for “non-commercial” apps, but how does Reddit determine this?
- This would require developers to create apps for the blind for free, volunteering their effort to keep users engaged with Reddit. They deserve to make money too. (Also, Reddit shouldn’t be making apps that aren’t remotely accessible in the first place!)
- Access to NSFW (not safe for work) content
- Reddit has restricted NSFW content to their official channels, with no reasons given or protections for using this content in third party apps
- They want third party apps to be able to access NSFW content, even if they have to agree to additional changes and guidelines
It’s worth noting that no one’s asking for a free ride. Everyone agrees that Reddit has a right to set pricing and should be able to charge for their data. They just don’t want to be priced out of their own apps. Reddit went from claiming this was about preventing AI scraping of their data, but quickly turned on third party developers.
The blackout will continue until Reddit makes changes, though some subreddits will be back online tomorrow.
There’s a Path Forward
There is a very easy path forward here. Third party developers want Reddit to be successful and profitable, just as much as they want to keep working on Reddit apps. Everyone agrees! But it seems that Reddit doesn’t want to compromise, they just want the third parties that have lifted Reddit up to die. Reddit could easily make money through a profit sharing initiative, a separate API for ads, allowing users to bring their own API key and pay subscriptions directly to Reddit, and many other compromises that allow Reddit to collect revenue from a larger variety of sources (we call that profit diversification) and therefore have a more sustainable path towards profitability and beyond. Everyone would be happy to implement changes to their APIs to help Reddit, but the company has denied developers the time to do so.
Apollo’s Christian Selig said that, if the pricing was half of what it is and he had 90 days, he could have worked something out. From just one developer, that’s as much as $10 million in revenue for this year alone that Reddit’s throwing away. Is that what a profit-focused company would do? Reddit could make tens of millions a year just for the API, that’s ignoring selling data analysis in other ways as well as advertising.
Selig says he’s 90% sure Reddit will abandon third party apps, that Apollo will shut down at the end of the month. But he’s not without hope.
“But that 10 percent of me really hopes that I’ll be able to say, ‘I hopped on a call with Steve. We talked it out. There were some pleasantries exchanged about misunderstandings. We’re all good now, they’re giving us more time to adopt the API, and we’re sticking around.’ I would love that. But it’s totally in Reddit’s court. I’m happy to talk whenever, but I just haven’t been able to reach them.”
– Apollo’s creator, Christian Selig, in an interview with The Verge
Where Do We Go?
There’s not much for users to do besides join a boycott. They could use the official website and app (if they don’t have vision impairments), but even sighted users have reported that these apps are all but unusable. Most frequent Reddit users still use the old view of Reddit, and many have switched from the official mobile app to a third party client. The interface is slow, clunky, laggy, and poorly formatted.
If you’re looking for a Reddit alternative, the Fediverse, that is a group of federated servers with the same core software systems, has answers. What Mastodon is to Twitter, kbin is to Reddit. kbin has seen a dramatic influx of users since Reddit announced its API changes and apps announced they’d close down. Perhaps those users won’t ever go back.
Reddit’s betting they will, but perhaps they just need some good third party developers to make apps to help kbin and other competitors catch on. I wonder where those developers will come from.
Sources:
- Karissa Bell, Engadget
- C. Scott Brown, Android Authority
- Brian Fung, CNN
- Thomas Germain, Gizmodo
- Scharon Harding, Ars Technica
- Jay Peters, The Verge, [2]
- David Pierce and Nilay Patel, The Verge
- Emma Roth, The Verge
- Mia Sato and Jay Peters, The Verge
- Umar Shakir, The Verge
- Chance Townsend, Mashable
- The Verge’s Timeline of the Reddit API Changes