Reddit CEO not backing down on 3rd-party app charges after protest
Global News
Most people visiting Reddit probably don’t think about APIs but access to these third-party resources is critical for moderators to do their jobs, experts note.
If you hopped on Reddit to scroll through your favorite 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 over the company’s plan to start charging certain third-party developers to access the site’s data.
But Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman told The Associated Press he’s not backing off.
“Protest and dissent is important,” Huffman said. “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.”
Organizers of the protest say Reddit’s new policy threatens to end key ways of historically customizing the platform using an API, or application programming interface, which allows computer programs to communicate with each another. Third-party developers rely on API data to create their apps, which offer access to features that are unavailable in the official Reddit app, particularly for content moderation and accessibility aids.
But Reddit says that supporting these third-party developers is too expensive and that the new policy is necessary to become a self-sustaining business.
Reddit has more than 100,000 active subreddits, and nearly 9,000 of them went dark this week. While some returned to their public settings after 48 hours, others say they plan to stay private 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.
Reddit notes that the vast majority of subreddit communities are still active. 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.
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