As Subreddit Blackouts Loom, Reddit CEO Announces AMA About Controversial API Changes

Reddit will host a high-stakes ask me anything (AMA) session on Friday with its current CEO, and it is likely going to garner a lot of attention. Reddit chief Steve Huffman will be addressing topics like "the latest API updates, including accessibility, mod bots, and third-party mod tools," according to the company. The API part will be a topic of hot contention, considering what has unfolded over the past few weeks in the wake of Reddit announcing the end of free APIs.

Short for Application Programming Interface, it's the secret code sauce that allows everything from a moderation bot to a third-party app to talk with a platform and do its intended job. Reddit has so far kept its APIs free, but it recently decided to charge for it, just like Twitter. Unlike Twitter, Reddit hasn't announced an outright ban on third-party clients, but it also won't tolerate a product that makes money while using the APIs for free. The end result is more or less the same in either case.

As a result, one of the most popular Reddit clients, Apollo, is calling it quits on June 30 citing the inability to pay API fees that could go up to $20 million each year. Thousands of Reddit communities, some of which have millions of followers, have announced a planned 48-hour shut down in protest, threatening that they could permanently close their gates if they don't get a fair deal from Reddit.

"Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with," Huffman told The New York Times in April 2023, adding that Reddit won't give away its valuable trove of human data for free. Reddit's API change is not only controversial for its pricing strategy but also for the small window it has given developers of apps and moderation tools to embrace the API fee policies.

With beloved apps like Apollo shutting down and some of its largest communities protesting against a "greedy" move, Reddit has attracted a lot of bad press. To its credit, the company is making some concessions in its API policy. Developers making tools that improve accessibility, bots that keep the platform tidy, and researchers using it for academic purposes will have free access to the APIs.

However, the company is strictly against any product that uses the API and generates a profit, and more importantly, doesn't share the spoils with Reddit. The AMA will likely explore the dos and don'ts of Reddit's API policy, but Huffman won't walk away without some stinging questions over the controversial move. Reddit wants to keep the good part of its community free from the dark API fee shadow, but all that moderation and rewarding work by bots is built atop hours of volunteer work, while their creators remain at loggerheads with the API policy.