2023 Reddit API controversy
In April 2023, the discussion and news aggregation website Reddit announced its intentions to charge for its application programming interface (API), a feature which had been free since 2008, causing a dispute.
[5] In 2008, Reddit introduced its application programming interface (API), granting developers access to the site's corpus of posts and comments.
[7] In 2021, Reddit hired Aimee Knight, whose father, David Challenor, was convicted earlier that year for raping and torturing a 10-year-old child, resulting in another blackout.
[8] On April 18, 2023, Reddit announced it would charge for its API service amid a potential initial public offering.
In spite of those changes, Huffman said that the API would continue to be available for free for developers who create moderation tools or researchers who use Reddit's data for academic purposes.
[15] Amid concerns that these applications could no longer work, Reddit responded by stating that it would give "non-commercial, accessibility-focused" apps an exception from their pricing terms.
Concerning the changes for third-party apps, he said Reddit could "no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use."
He added that Reddit "needs to be fairly paid to continue supporting high-usage third-party apps", noting that the new API pricing "is based on usage levels that we measure to be comparable to our own costs".
[30] Efforts to promote fediverse-based alternatives were marred with paranoia after Reddit banned users and subreddits related to Lemmy and Kbin.
[32] At approximately 10:58 a.m. Eastern Time, Reddit was affected by a major outage caused by "expected stability issues" due to the large number of subreddits going private.
[35] Similarly, r/philadelphia went private following the collapse of a portion of Interstate 95 in Pennsylvania, leading to angry comments from users and requests to reopen.
[42] On June 22, Reddit began pressuring subreddits that continued their blackout to reopen, according to a message released publicly by an r/DIY moderator.
[43] r/TranscribersOfReddit, a subreddit that provides alternate text for images posted to Reddit, announced it would shut down on June 30.
r/aww opened its subreddit a day later, only allowing "adorable content featuring John Oliver, Chiijohn, and anything else that closely resembles them".
[46] BotDefense, a crowd-sourced community effort to remove bots on Reddit, left the site in July.
[52] On July 20, Reddit began its third iteration of r/place, an interactive canvas in which users can only place one pixel every five minutes, announcing it one day earlier.
Users organized to create a subreddit to protest the API on the canvas,[53] and numerous messages of "Fuck spez"—referring to Huffman's Reddit username—were written.
[54] The canvas was expanded two days later, leading to more messages critical of Huffman, although they were largely overwritten in favor of art.
This depiction included the likeness of the Reddit mascot, Snoo, positioned atop the guillotine's block, with the name "spez" inscribed on it.
[57] The ransomware group BlackCat threatened to release 80 gigabytes of data if Reddit does not pay US$4.5 million and undo the API changes.
[62] On June 29, Mojang Studios, the developers of Minecraft, would cease posting game updates and official content onto Reddit, citing moderation and rule changes.
[63] Columnist Megan McArdle compared Reddit to the nonprofit organization Goodwill and said that the site's moderators have "essentially gone on strike".
[64] The Verge reporter Jay Peters noted that the quality of Google Search results decreased, citing the lack of resources for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2023), among other grievances.
