Headline Roundup • June 17th, 2023
Reddit Communities Protest New Policy to Charge for API
Summary from the AllSides News Team
Many Subreddits went dark this week in protest of a new Reddit policy that will charge some for access to its Application Programming Interface.
The Details: In efforts to become profitable and control the user experience, the online forum website plans to charge high-usage third-party developers. As a result, many popular Subreddits have become private in protest, aiming to deter the company’s decision, which does not appear to be changing course.
For Context: API allows users to customize the way information is presented from the source. Third-party services aim to customize the user experience in ways like improving accessibility or removing advertisements – one of Reddit’s key forms of revenue. Popular ones include Reddit Is Fun, and Apollo, which will both be shutting down on June 30. Twitter announced a similar policy in late March.
Key Quotes: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said, “Running a product like Reddit is expensive. I would like to be a self-sustaining company — it means we’re defensible... and that we can endure into the future. So that’s what we’re working towards.”
How The Media Covered It: The news was most widely covered by Left-rated sources. Fox News (Right bias) provided a significant portion of Huffman’s comments, and ABC News (Lean Left bias) also presented input from Huffman. Wired (Center bias) presented little of Huffman’s perspective, and said the move is driven by Reddit’s ambitions to become “more profitable,” however Forbes (Center bias) says Reddit is not profitable.
Featured Coverage of this Story
The Associated Press
Thousands of Reddit discussion forums have gone dark this week to protest a new policy that will charge some third-party apps to access data on the site, leading to worries about content moderation and accessibility.
“Reddit is killing third-party applications (and itself)," multiple subreddits wrote in posts seen on the platform's homepage this week.
The new fees are part of broader changes to Reddit's API, or application programming interface, that the company announced recently.
Organizers of the blackout, which began Monday, say Reddit's changes threaten to end key ways of historically customizing...
ILONA SAKHNO/ALAMY
It's pretty easy to piss people off on Reddit. Less so to piss off seemingly everyone on the platform.
Still, Reddit’s management has succeeded in doing just that as it weathers protests over its decision to charge for access to its API. That ruling risks putting the company in a death spiral as users revolt, the most dedicated community caretakers quit, and the vibrant discussions move to other platforms.
The company’s changes to its data access policies effectively price out third-party developers who make mobile applications for browsing Reddit; two of the...
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Tiffany Hagler-Geard/Bloomberg via Getty Images
A number of popular subreddits restricted users from accessing information from June 12-14 as a form of protest against Reddit's new policies that they say are severely hampering third-party apps.
A subreddit is a topic-specific community on the website Reddit.
Subreddits range from broad topics such as "r/WorldNews" to more niche interests, such as specific sports teams, locations or hobbies.
More than 8,000 subreddits pledged to join the protest, according to the Twitch streamer Reddark_247, who streamed a live view of subreddits that had "gone dark" in protest.
More than...
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