App developers using the Reddit platform have said that next month’s changes to Reddit API pricing could make your applications unsustainable. Now, in protest, dozens of the biggest subreddits are planning to go private for two days.
Putting a subreddit to private, also known as “going dark”, will mean that participating communities will be inaccessible to the general public while the planned 48-hour protest lasts from June 12 and others have said that if there is no solution in those two days, they will disappear forever.
Among others, the following will participate in this protest: r/videos, r/reactiongifs, r/earthporn and r/lifeprotips. Here is the entire list. They are communities with more than a million followers.
This is how prices go up
The protest comes after the developers of several third-party apps for Reddit have stated that the future of their services is threatened by the company’s new pricing.
For example, the developer behind Apollo said that at its current rate of making 7 billion requests a month, would have to pay 1.7 million dollars for access to the Reddit APIor $20 million a year.
The developer Christian Selig has recalled that the amounts they are going to face are so high They don’t even know how they could reach them.
The creator of Reddit is Fun said that would have to pay a figure “of the same order” as Apollo to continue operating and that “he doesn’t earn anywhere near this figure.”
Reddit Arguments
One of the Reddit employees has argued the company’s point of view: he says that the new API fees should be affordable if third-party applications they are efficient with the API calls they make.
“Our price is $0.24 per 1,000 API calls, which is less than $1 per user per month for a reasonably working app“.
And about Apollo he said: “Apollo as an app is less efficient than its peers and has been overkill at times, probably because it’s been free to be.”
You have to remember that the company is going public and wants to get a return for using all the data. As we learned about his strategy in April It would go through charging a monthly fee to developers who use its API. From that moment the days have passed and it was precisely the developer of Apollo, a Reddit client for iOS, who has revealed the amount of the fees.
Reddit has data that has been used to train ChatGPT and also wants companies to pay for them.
Image | Genbeta
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