In the past few days, one might have come across the strange message of seeing several subreddit pages going private. They would display that so and so subreddit has gone private and state the reason for doing so, many of which are overwhelmingly saying it’s as a protest move.
But what is this Reddit protest that has led to thousands of subreddits to carryout a platform-wide blackout?
What Is The Reddit Protest?
As per reports, it was decided by over 3,000 subreddits that on Monday they will be going ‘private’ as a way to protest Reddit’s decision of trying to monetise access to its data. Going ‘private’ or dark on the social news site will prevent anyone not part of the community from seeing their posts.
A lot of subreddits with large followings like r/todayilearned, r/funny and r/gaming having over 30 million subscribers each have joined while r/iPhone and r/unexpected that have over 1 million subscribers have also joined the protest among many other ones.
It is not strange to go on a certain subreddit and see the following notification:
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It is expected that the blackout will last for 48 hours but some are planning to protest indefinitely or at least until Reddit rolls back its latest decision, however long that takes.
Why Are They Protesting?
The protest is a move to call out the new changes being made to the site’s application programming interface (API). Earlier, third parties, companies, and developers could freely access the platform’s API and in turn the vast amount of Reddit data, but in April the platform announced that it would start charging third parties for access to its API.
According to reports, from 1st July 2023, Reddit is expected to charge developers that “require higher usage limits $0.24 for every 1,000 API calls or less than $1 per user every month.”
The Apollo app, a popular platform that offers an alternate user interface to the official Reddit platform, has been heavily against this move, stating that the extremely high fees have “made it impossible” for them to continue offering their service.
As per Apollo’s sole developer, Christian Selig, any third-party apps would now have to charge their users around $5 (around Rs. 411) every month in order to be able to pay Reddit their new fees.
What Change Is Reddit Making? Apparently, their reasoning is generative AI (artificial intelligence) and how tools like GHATGPT or Microsoft’s OpenAI can be trained using the free access to Reddit’s conversation forums and find and collect data.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman stated to New York Times in April that “Reddit corpus of data is really valuable” and that he doesn’t want to “give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
Image Credits: Google Images
Feature Image designed by Saudamini Seth
Sources: The Guardian, The Indian Express, Business Today
Find the blogger: @chirali_08
This post is tagged under: Reddit Protest, ChatGPT, subreddits, subreddits dark, reddit blackout, subreddits reddit protest, subreddits dark, subreddits blackout
Disclaimer: We do not hold any right, copyright over any of the images used, these have been taken from Google. In case of credits or removal, the owner may kindly mail us.
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