Thousands Of Reddit Community Protest New API Policy

7,000 Reddit communities protested changes to the company's new App Programming Interface (API) (photo; reddit dock)

JAKARTA - Finally, more than 7,000 Reddit communities protested changes to the company's new App Programming Interface (API), by limiting group content so that it is not visible to the public.

This action affects Reddit's largest online community, such as popular groups devoted to music, history, sports and video games as well as thousands of smaller networks.

Including r/funny, r/gaming and r/Music, each of which has more than 30 million subscribers, are set to private. This means that the community will not be available to the public.

On April 18, Reddit announced a change in its API, a policy that will charge third-party apps to continue using its platform.

The new policy will require third-party apps of 0.24 US dollars per 1,000 API calls, forcing third-party apps such as Apollo and Sync to close due to high prices.

Over the years, Reddit users have been able to browse posts, write comments, share images and videos on Reddit from third-party apps.

Third-party apps use API for free before new policy changes. Many mobile users use this app to explore platforms instead of using the Reddit app.

Apollo developer Christian Selig estimates the payout will reach $20 million per year. He also claims Reddit accused him of extortion and other app developers say Reddit did not respond to questions.

"His behavior and communication with us have been going on everywhere, telling us one thing while saying something completely different externally, recording and leaking personal phone calls "to a point where I don't know how we can do business with him," said Reddit CEO Steve Huffman in response to Selig in the thread Ask Me Anything last week.

Huffman revealed that third-party developers need to pay for API access because big language models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT are being trained on their data, so the company wants to generate revenue from there. This was quoted from USA Today and The Register, Tuesday, June 13.