Some more casual users say they’re going back to Tumblr, which is still recovering from its own corporate sanitization in 2018. Bruckman advocates for public funding of a nonprofit version of something akin to Reddit. Like with Twitter, no clear alternative has emerged as a replacement. Bruckman says she knows a moderator who has already quit, saying it wasn’t worth the energy to devote so much time to a company that can just toss all that effort aside. These hosts kind of run into this confusion that their hosting is the reason people are going there, but it’s really for the other users on the medium.”Īnd those users are bailing. “The content of the users is what makes the platform worth visiting. “They’re shooting themselves in the foot,” Mir says. Force everyone to interact on one app, and it’s easier to fill their feeds with whatever advertising you want. But in an interview with NPR, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said limiting third-party access will also help Reddit keep control over how it displays ads-the company’s primary source of income-to users. The company initially said that limiting its API access is a move meant to control the flow of data being gobbled up by generative artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI training their large language models. Reddit has denied that it is specifically targeting third-party apps like Apollo and RIF. “And this feels like it's trampling on that.”
“Beyond the fact that it’s in a dozen ways harder to do our job, it’s also just the case that Reddit felt more like an open platform where innovation by committed users was encouraged,” Bruckman says. It might be a vocal minority of users who are pissed off about the changes, but they’re the people who volunteer their time to keep communities functional-and they’re arguably the most important users on the site. A move like this has angered so many people on Reddit because it feels like a betrayal of the community’s trust. Reddit charging for access to its API is also about more than just third-party clients, Bruckman says. Those apps also have far smaller user bases than Apollo or RIF. After some initial backlash from users and disability advocates who said Reddit’s changes would adversely affect accessibility-focused apps aimed at people with dyslexia or vision impairments, Reddit said it would exempt those apps from the price hikes. 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 most popular options, Reddit Is Fun and Apollo, which together have over 41 million downloads, are both shutting down.
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. Still, Reddit’s management has succeeded in doing just that as it weathers protests over its decision to charge for access to its API. Less so to piss off seemingly everyone on the platform. It’s pretty easy to piss people off on Reddit.
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