Several prominent communities on Reddit are planning to go private in protest against the platform’s decision to monetize access to its data. Over 3,000 subreddits are participating in the protest by temporarily locking their doors on Monday, effectively preventing non-members from viewing their posts.
Among the participating forums are r/todayilearned, r/funny, and r/gaming, each boasting over 30 million subscribers. Other communities with over a million members, including r/iPhone and r/unexpected, have already closed their doors in anticipation of the strike.
The protest revolves around upcoming changes to Reddit’s “API” (Application Programming Interface), which enables other companies to utilize Reddit data in their own products and services. These changes will introduce substantial fees for “premium access,” rendering popular third-party Reddit apps, such as Apollo, unsustainable. Apollo’s sole developer, Christian Selig, estimates that such apps would need to charge users around $5 (£4) per month merely to cover the new fees imposed by Reddit.
A similar conflict unfolded on Twitter in the 2010s, as both platforms have a devoted user base reliant on third-party apps that undercut the social networks’ ad-supported business model.
However, the clash on Reddit is primarily driven by the tension between the social network and AI companies like OpenAI, which have extensively scraped Reddit data to train their systems. Reddit’s founder and CEO, Steve Huffman, acknowledged the value of the platform’s data corpus, stating that they should not give away that value to the largest companies in the world for free.
In a joint statement, the moderators of the participating subreddits expressed their concerns: “On June 12th, many subreddits will be going dark to protest this policy. Some will return after 48 hours, while others may shut down permanently unless the issue is adequately addressed. Many moderators struggle to carry out their work due to the limited tools provided by the official app. We take this action because we love Reddit and firmly believe that this change will make it impossible to continue doing what we love.”
