All about Reddit policy change: Subreddits continue boycott campaign, no change in company's API pricing stand

Subreddits are protesting the company's increased API pricing for its third-party apps.

Published on: Jun 15, 2023, 13:37:46 IST

By Adarsh Kumar Gupta

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Planned changes to the Reddit API has opened a can of worms. Thousands of popular subreddits have joined a campaign against it. While this has caused issues for Reddit which hosts various trending content, the boycott campaign has proved to be a blessing in disguise for other social networks.

The boycott was supposed to end Wednesday but some Subreddits are staying put indefinitely. Shocked by the backlash, CEO Steve Huffman released an internal memo on Monday in which he appealed the staff to stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. Huffman expressed hope that the noise around API pricing will die out and pass.

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"There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well," reads a part from the memo.

In the memo, Huffman also said: "We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor."

What's the boycott about?

Subreddits are protesting the company's increased API pricing for its third-party apps. API which stands for Application Programming Interface is used by several third-party developers to power their own Reddit-based apps.

Some Reddit communities have gone dark as a form of boycott and plan to stay private indefinitely till Reddit relents and makes changes.

Why Reddit is making the change?

It's all about data. Subreddits host lot of data in the form of conversations, images, comments etc. which can be used to train AI tools such as ChatGpt. In an interview to New York Times in April, Huffman said "Reddit corpus of data is really valuable" and he doesn't want to "need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free."

Which third-party apps are shutting down?

Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others have announced that they plan to shut down by the end of this month.

When will the new API pricing take effect?

The new changes including API pricing is set to take effect from July 01,2023.

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