Image by me, DALL-E and Craiyon

This Monday, from June 12th, Reddit is facing a “blackout”, meaning many subreddit moderators will turn their subs temporarily — possibly for two days — private in protest of Reddit’s recently announced API pricing changes¹. However I believe this conflict is a sign of more to come, and it raises questions about who the stakeholders in a social media platform are.

API Access and pricing, here we go again

A couple of months back Reddit announced that it would introduce a paid API tier², in addition to some other changes such as API access to NSFW (“not safe for work”) content. Charging a juicy price for API access sounds familiar? Didn’t we just go through the same with Twitter? We come back to that later.

Some changes were expected after OpenAI revealed that it used Reddit’s API on a massive scale to feed training data into its GPT models, something Reddit obviously wasn’t amused about.

The obvious fear is that the changes in API access will restrict and very possible completely end third-party apps like Apollo, Reddit is Fun or advanced search tools like Camas. Those third-party apps have grown extremely popular over time, not the least because of Reddit’s own long standing negligence of mobile for many years. For many users those third-party apps and tools have made Reddit what it is today: the 20th largest website in the world according to Similarweb.

For many users those third-party apps and tools have made Reddit what it is today

Those fears seem to be well founded: One developer of the Apollo app has — after directly negotiating with Reddit — stated that if prices stayed as announced the project would have to pay “about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year”³. (Update: The developers of Apollo have now announced that they will close the app on June 30th⁶)

Hence, while Reddit has praised the work of third-party developers, the suspicion is that this is not so much about making some extra API profit, but a strategy to shut down third-party apps all together and a plan to drive users to the official — ad supported — Reddit mobile app. In addition, as many users have commented, that this might just be a sign of changes to come, and that eventually other third-party tools currently unaffected by the changes will have to go, too.

So far the moderators of over 1000 subs have announced to join the blackout⁴, including some of the largest subs with more than 30 million members. It’s not the first time subreddit mods have staged a blackout in protest, with the most prominent example the “AMAgeddon” blackout of 2015, when mods protested the sacking of Victoria Taylor⁵, a popular Reddit admin who facilitated many “Ask Me Anything(AMA)” events.

Stakeholders — Who made Reddit what it is, and who “owns it”?

Like Twitter in its first years, early Reddit was a rather barebone service greatly shaped by its users. For younger users this time may lie in the ancient past but it differs significantly from other platforms like Instagram or TikTok, who either came along as polished products or were never particularly “open”. More than any other platform Reddit users not only provide content: Reddit is overwhelmingly moderated by its user mods and have shaped to make a platform with relatively sparse features massively enjoyable. They have also shaped the culture and way Reddit is being used. Reddit mods act also — as proven by their concerted protests — more as “community” than on any other platform.

Users have invested countless hours of their life into the platform … and understandably have developed a feeling of “shared ownership”.

Populated with user content, moderated by volunteer mods and supported by tools created by enthusiasts, users have invested countless hours of their life (and often money, too) into the platform — many being involved for longer than a decade - and understandably have developed a feeling of “shared ownership”: Reddit the company runs the technical service, users and mods provide the rest. And when it comes to third-party apps and tools, many developers feel those tools apps should be treated with the same level of respect as Reddit itself.

Why now?

Other than Twitter, Reddit has not been taken over by some megalomaniac billionaire, and differently from Musk’s Twitter, Reddit has not publicly indicated a major paradigm change for its platform, so what’s going on?

There is of course Reddit’s long discussed IPO on the horizon, a thorny issue: Potential investors will expect Reddit to have the platform under control, technically as well as socially. Which is — in the case of Reddit — a challenge due to its quite anarchic history. This has already let to an obvious increase in advertisement (with banner ads and promoted links) and experiments to turn other features into money. However it is hard to imagine that a mod protests and multi-day blackouts will make Reddit more attractive to investors (imagine this with a publicly traded company).

Twitter’s recent purge of third-party apps has certainly left a bad taste

What I find strange however is why Reddit — who should clearly have seen this conflict coming — has chosen to pick this fight now. Twitter’s recent purge of third-party apps has certainly left a bad taste; and let’s not forget that many of the third-party developers are the same people who were targeted by Twitter.

A Wider Question for social media

There is no doubt that providing an API service costs money and bills need to be paid. And — legally — Reddit the business has of course the right to do what it wants. But because of the history of Reddit the question of why mods and developers should invest time and work, and to what extend they are being seen by the company as stakeholders, is one Reddit has to answer in some way or the other. Twitter has shown not to care but Reddit might answer this differently.

If Reddit is genuine about its concerns about the abuse of the API by data scrapers like OpenAI, an arrangement with legit third-party apps should be possible. If, on the other hand, this is truly an attempt to optimise monetisation in the run up to an IPO, including being part of a strategy to shut down apps indirectly and possibly other tools later, this will be a hard sell: Reddit moderators hold an unusual amount of power for users on a social media platform.