Reddit, the popular internet forum and one of the most visited web pages in the world, went ‘shutdown’ today to protest new fees app developers will have to pay if they want to access its content.
More than 7,800 subreddits (each of the sections of the forum that has tens of thousands of groups specialized in all kinds of topics) have decided to join this symbolic blackout, closing themselves to new members in protest, some for a period of 48 hours. and others indefinitely.
The decision has even made the Reddit website inaccessible for a few hours, due to the problems that the simultaneous change in the permissions of so many groups has caused on the servers. In the comments, many users have also asked other visitors not to buy Reddit’s virtual currency, with which it is possible to “reward” other commentators, or give money to the company through other tools and subscriptions.
The protest has been brewing since the beginning of June, when Christan Selig, developer of the popular app Apollo (a client to access Reddit content from mobile) announced that the new API fees would make it impossible for him to continue developing the app. the application.
“Going from an open and free API for eight years to a closed one with disproportionate costs is not something you can do in 30 days,” he lamented to Selig, complaining both about the short time they have given developers and the excessive price of API access, which is how the anchors are known in programming that allow an application to access data from a service such as Twitter or Reddit, for example, quickly and in an appropriate format.
With the number of inquiries Apollo generates in a year, Selig would have to pay close to $20 million a year. Although your app has a paid version with advanced features and is one of the most popular applications to access the service, it is not enough to cover the new access price.
The situation especially affects the community of Reddit users because for a long time the web did not have an official application to access from the mobile and although there is now one, it is considered very deficient. A large part of Reddit users, therefore, consult the forum information using these third-party apps that are now going to disappear.
Steve Huffman, the current president of Reddit, tried to calm users with an open interview last Friday, explaining the company’s version, but instead, he was criticized by thousands of users for the way in which he has announced the new measures and the arrogance with which it has responded to the developers. In addition to the price of the API, many also complain about some of the artificially imposed limits on third-party clients that cannot, for example, access channels with explicit adult content.
For Huffman, they are necessary measures because, until now, Reddit has been covering the cost that these third-party clients generate on their servers with the different requests for content. The website, which has almost 430 million monthly active users, wants to go public soon, and therefore must focus on profitability.
Despite the protests, which include some of the most popular subreddits on the web, such as r/music, r/gaming or r/funny, Huffman has already stated that he does not intend to give up.
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