If you hopped on Reddit to scroll through your favourite forums this week, you may have encountered “private” or “restricted” messages. That’s because thousands of subreddits chose to go dark in an ongoing protest of some controversial changes announced by the online discussion network.
The blackout, which began Monday, emerged out of outrage over Reddit’s upcoming changes to its application programming interface (API) access – notably the company’s plan to start charging high usage third-party apps, who have long-used the Reddit data at no cost to build resources for users not available through the official site or app.
Organizers of the protest say that Reddit’s new policy threatens to end key ways of historically customizing the platform, which relies heavily on the volunteer labour of subreddit moderators. Many users currently rely on third-party apps to access features that are unavailable in the official Reddit app, particularly for content moderation and accessibility aids.
But Reddit says that supporting these high usage third-party developers is too expensive and that the new policy is necessary to become a self-sustaining business. Despite this week’s blackout, the company says it is not changing its course.
“The analogy I like to use for Reddit is, Reddit is a city … and what we’re seeing today is a protest in our city,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told the Associated Press. “Protest and dissent is important … The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything because we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on.”
But the blackout is not over, organizers say. Nearly 9,000 subreddits went dark this week. Reddit as a whole currently has more than 100,000 active subreddits. While some returned to their public settings after 48 hours, others say they plan to stay private indefinitely until Reddit meets their demands – which include lowering third-party developer charges, set to go into effect July 1, so that popular apps don’t shut down.
As of Friday, more than 4,000 subreddits were still participating in the blackout – including communities with tens of millions of subscribers like r/music and r/videos – according to a tracker and live Twitch stream of the boycott.
The vast majority of subreddit communities are still active, Reddit notes. And while Huffman maintains that he respects users’ rights to protest, he also says that the subreddits currently participating in the blackout are “not going to stay offline indefinitely” – even if that means finding new moderators.
The company’s response to the blackout has fuelled further outrage among protest organizers, most recently after the move to replace moderators of protesting subreddits.
“A lot of what’s going on here is … (Reddit) burning goodwill with users. And that’s so much more expensive than trying to collaborate,” Omar, a moderator of a subreddit participating in this week’s blackout, told the Associated Press. Omar asked not to be identified by their full name in this article, due to safety concerns that have come up while moderating their subreddit.
Most people visiting Reddit probably don’t think about API, but access to these third-party resources is critical for moderators to do their jobs, experts note.
Sarah Gilbert, postdoctoral associate at Cornell University and Citizens and Technology Lab research manager, explains that API access helps moderators keep communities safe and “more quickly respond to spam, bigotry, and harassment.” Third-party apps are also important for screen readers, she said, as the official Reddit app is not accessible for people who are visually impaired.
“Reddit is built on volunteer moderation labour, including the creation and maintenance of many tools,” Gilbert said in a statement. “Without Reddit’s volunteer moderators, the site could likely see less helpful content, and more spam, misinformation and hate.”
Gilbert and Omar say the new policy could significantly risk moderator burnout and retention. Those consequences may not be immediately felt, they added, and could have an impact on the content seen on Reddit, which calls itself the “front page of the internet.” Reddit has roughly 430 million active monthly users, making it one of the internet’s top sites.
“The quality of the content … is going to start to degrade. And it’s not going to be something that we see overnight,” Omar said. “It’s going to be something that we see day over day … And we’re not going to notice it – until it’s too late.”
Reddit has pushed back on some of these concerns, saying that 93% of mod actions are currently taken through desktop and native Reddit apps.
Huffman and Reddit management also note that the new fees will only apply to eligible third-party apps that require high usage limits. According to Thursday metrics published by the company, 98% of apps will continue to have free access to the Data API as long as they’re not monetized and remain below Reddit’s data-usage threshold.
The company has also promised that moderator tools and bots will continue to have free access to the Data API and has made agreements with some non-commercial, accessibility-focused apps to exempt them from new fees. Still, some moderators say they rely on popular apps that are shutting down over the new costs.
Apollo and Reddit Is Fun, for example, have already announced plans to shutter at the end of June.
While Reddit argues that the upcoming fees for high usage third-party apps – which stand at a rate of 24 cents for 1,000 API calls – is reasonable, others strongly disagree. Apollo developer Christian Selig estimated fees would total about $20 million a year, for example.
Huffman has pushed back on that estimate, but protest organizers and other developers maintain that fees are unsustainable – calling on Reddit to lower the price so that third-party apps can stay alive.
“We understand that Reddit needs to be profitable on some level to exist … We’re not against paying for the API. The prices need to change,” said Omar, who also pointed to the frustration surrounding the quick time frame of learning about the fees. Reddit first announced that it would be updating its API access in April, but didn’t specify the price until May 31, giving developers and moderators barely a month before the July 1 start date.
It’s hard to anticipate the total amount of money Reddit will save and earn after implementing charges for high-usage, third-party apps. But Huffman says the “pure infrastructure costs” of supporting these apps costs Reddit about $10 million each year.
“We can’t subsidize other people’s businesses,” Huffman said. “We didn’t ban third-party apps – we said, ‘you need to cover your costs’ … We just ask that (these apps) pay the same bills that we need to pay.”
Reddit’s changes to its API also arrives as the San Francisco-based company reportedly seeks to go public later this year. While Huffman couldn’t directly address the rumoured initial public offering, he underlined the need for Reddit to become self-sustaining.
“I think every business has a duty to become profitable eventually – for our employees shareholders, for our investors shareholders and, one day as a public company, hopefully our user shareholders as well,” said Huffman, who co-founded the site in 2005.
Reddit first filed for an IPO in 2021, but paused its plans amid a plunge in tech stocks. As eyes on a possible, renewed IPO take shift for the second half of 2023, finance experts speculate that the company may be trying to display increased revenue and profitability to investors.
“My guess is that they feel strong pressure in advance of the IPO to show that they can generate revenue from other sources,” Luke Stein, a finance professor at Babson College, told the Associated Press – noting that monetizing API could create another avenue for revenue streams, rather than relying on advertising and new users as Reddit has done in the past.
Experts also pointed to the significance of Reddit showing a way to charge AI companies that have historically used Reddit data at no cost to develop large-scale and for-profit AI models.
Still, the IPO is uncertain and the API changes could have consequences as well.
“If they actually manage to make the changes stick, (they could) increase their revenue. On the other hand, if they alienate their best users, it could cause issues down the road, especially if those users decide to move to other platforms,” said James Angel, an associated professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.
He added a big question is “Are there any other platforms that really fit the role that Reddit has?” – pointing to similarities seen on Twitter following Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform last year. Twitter also ended free API access earlier this year, sparking outrage.
Stein believes there will be more clarity over the next two weeks – based on seeing if moderation and administration remains strong on popular subreddits after power users are cut off from impacted third-party tools.
“If some of the large communities have declining engagement, or have an explosion of spam that’s less effectively moderated, and if it looks like these communities are able to move toward alternative platforms, I think investors are likely to be highly spooked,” Stein said.