Reddit Groups go silent amid AI-Linked fee dispute: Who gets affected?

The moderators of hundreds of Reddit forums, known as subreddits, closed off access to their groups on Monday to protest the company’s plan to charge for access to the data that outside developers need to run apps on the site. Many said the new pricing scheme could kill off some of the most popular third-party apps that many users rely on to browse and comment on the site. Others said the charges had sowed uncertainty about the tools that moderators use to manage discussions. 

What prompted the blackout?

The action has been in the works for weeks after Reddit announced in April that it would start charging third parties for its application programming interface (API) — a software framework that allows a data provider and an end-user to communicate with each other. These charges kick in from July 1

Why is Reddit making the change?

One of the reasons is generative AI. Reddit’s conversation forums have a lot of data that can be used to train tools such as ChatGPT. While some of this data can be collected in an unstructured fashion, Reddit’s API makes it easier for companies to directly find and collate the data. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman (pictured) said in an interview with the New York Times in April that the “Reddit corpus of data is really valuable” and he doesn’t want to “need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free”

Who gets affected?

Thousands of subreddits — the forums dedicated to a specific topic on Reddit — are protesting the move and most of their moderators have planned a 48-hour blackout. Subreddits such as r/Music, r/gaming and r/todayilearned — all with more than 30 million subscribers — are taking part. Some like r/Music plan to protest indefinitely

What is Reddit saying?

Huffman on Friday noted the frustration among many moderators of Reddit communities but said the company can no longer subsidise commercial entities that require large-scale data use