Reddit was founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman, Aaron Swartz, and Alexis Ohanian. Since then, it has become one of the largest and liveliest social platforms on the internet. Without Reddit, we might never have AMAs. It’s not quite as mainstream as platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok, but Reddit’s seemingly infinite supply of communities — known as subreddits — has made it one of the web’s best sources of information and conversation. But Reddit has also been a magnet for controversy: Redditors have used the platform to spread misinformation and coordinate harassment, and it has been a source of illegal and problematic content for years. In 2023, Reddit brought more controversy on itself, announcing new plans to charge for its API that led to Apollo and other third-party apps shutting down along with a mass protest from users. And of course, like so many other things, the whole fight seemed to happen on Reddit.
The more than 300 subscribers on r/PlaceAPI are batting around ideas for protest art for the 2023 r/Place canvas that’s launching on Thursday.
In Reddit terms, that’s a comparatively tiny community, but they’re not the only ones thinking about how to use r/Place to share their discontent: a lot of people on Reddit’s announcement post are discussing ideas, too.
At Fast Company, Katie Notopoulos takes a deep dive into the Palantir meme-stock community:
One person in the Palantir fan Discord quipped, “Next time someone says Pili is a vampiric data-stealing, Trump-backing, AI-imposter, secretive-data-selling spytech company, you can say, ‘Sir, I object, it’s a vampiric data-stealing, Trump-backing, AI-imposter, secretive-data-selling spytech HUMANITARIAN company.’”
The stonk market is alive and well, I guess.
Toolbox is running into Reddit’s new API rate limits, but even CEO Steve Huffman said it should have free access. A Reddit admin (employee) says the company is looking into it.
Update July 11th, 6:40PM ET: The admin says the issue is fixed, and the user that posted the thread I linked to earlier about the issue says the issue appears to be resolved.
That’s based on screenshots shared in the moderator coordination subreddit, including a message from the Reddit admin (employee) account u/ModCodeofConduct.
The iOS app shut down last week. As of this writing, Apple is currently showcasing it as an Editors’ Choice app even though you can’t actually browse Reddit with it anymore. Apple is also featuring the official Reddit app right below Apollo.
Also, according to Christian Selig, the Apollo subreddit will be restricted, meaning you can’t make new posts but can chat in the comments of already-available posts.
The mods of the subreddit may be removed as a result, but they’ve accepted that.
“Our ethics won’t allow us in good faith to lie to you so Reddit can make a buck,” the mods wrote. “So when the sub gets turned over to whatever scab steps forward, we hope they have the decency to run it in a way that keeps you safe.”
Read more about the response to these warnings from Reddit in my story from Thursday, which I updated a few minutes ago.
BotDefense, a tool that helps fight bots in more than 3,600 subreddits and has nearly 150,000 accounts on its bans list, will be going away. As for why:
The community of users and moderators submitting accounts to us depend on Pushshift, the API, and third-party apps. And we would be deluding ourselves if we believed any assurances from Reddit given the track record of broken promises. Investing further resources into Reddit as a platform presents significant risks, and it’s safer to allocate one’s time, energy, and passions elsewhere.
They posted their response publicly for the community — and, presumably, Reddit — to read. According to the mods, the admin sent the moderators a message that they violated the moderator code of conduct by going NSFW.
Reddit has said it’s “not acceptable” for communities to switch to NSFW in protest of Reddit’s policies. r/PICS is trying to make the case that it should remain so given things like profanity on the subreddit, which technically counts as NSFW under Reddit’s content policy.
Users have been voting on the subreddit’s rules, and the newest one means you’ll be seeing a lot fewer actual videos in the community.
Currently, the subreddit’s rules are:
0. Posts must be videos
1. No Porn/Nudity/Gore
2. All post titles must contain profanity
3. Only text posts describing videos are permitted, and must describe a video in detail. Video links are permitted in the comments only.
r/PICS, another big subreddit, went NSFW on Monday.
In a tongue-in-cheek announcement post, the moderators said they had “no choice” because people had been posting profanity, which technically counts as NSFW (Not Safe For Work) under Reddit’s content policy. Despite the change, gore and pornography are still not allowed on the subreddit.
r/PICS has already been trying to stir the pot; it is one of a few subreddits now dedicated to John Oliver since reopening. We’ll have to wait and see if Reddit takes action against the subreddit, but it previously said that going NSFW to protest the company’s policies is “not acceptable.”
“When users are logged out, the app is still working because it does not use the OAuth client credentials while logged out,” developer Andrew Shu tells The Verge in an email. However, he expects that the app will stop working in this way soon.
Many third-party apps finally shut down on Friday.
“Since the latest “accessibility” update to the Reddit app, the amount and magnitude of new accessibility related bugs has made it virtually impossible for blind mods to operate on mobile,” the mods wrote. And since many third-party apps have shut down and one that had been granted an exemption for being accessibility-focused is apparently “impossible to log into,” they’re largely out of other options on mobile.
I’m getting kind of melancholy reading posts about Reddit apps actually going kaput. It has been clear for awhile that Reddit wouldn’t budge, but part of me still hoped something would change before today.
Here’s a few of the threads I’ve seen.
Christian Selig wrote a eulogy on the Apollo subreddit paying tribute to his app, which will be shutting down sometime Friday. (As I write this, the eulogy is at the top of r/all.)
I’m really heartbroken with how this whole process unfolded, I truly drank the Kool Aid talking to Reddit at the beginning that this was something they were going into in good faith with the interest of developers, moderators, and the community as a whole, but as many people pointed out to me, it’s clear now that ultimately wasn’t their intent. If they wanted something that could work for everyone, they would have simply made an effort to listen, instead of being dishonest, callous, and punitive in pricing. I’m sorry to all the folks who, like me, lost Apollo abruptly as a result of this. I had so much more I wanted to do with this app!
Other users are memorializing the app (and others), too.
“Rate limits will go into effect for all apps with usage above the free limit in the coming weeks, and some changes will be noticeable over the next 24 hours,” Reddit said in a post on Friday.
I’m guessing that means developers of some third-party apps like Apollo and RIF will start shutting things down soon.
That’s the latest stat from Reddit in an updated version of its “Key Facts to Understanding Reddit’s Recent API Updates” website. While more than 2,000 communities remain dark, according to the Reddark tracker, many that had shut down have opened up.
Reddit said last Friday the features would arrive by July 1st, and today, the company said they’re now available in its iOS app and coming “shortly” to its Android app.
One commenter asked for updates on accessibility of the app in general. In response, a Reddit admin (employee) promised this:
I’ll be back in a few weeks with an update about the work we’re doing on the general app experience. We know these improvements are important, and this is a high priority for Reddit.
Screenshot below.
One neat thing: though the app won’t let you browse Reddit very soon, you’ll still be able to customize the app icon if you want to keep it around and looking good on your phone.
The more than 2 million subscribers to the subreddit can now access it again. But the moderators of the community aren’t done protesting:
Given Reddit’s poor history of following through on promises to support moderators, we are following r/science’s lead, and intend to hold the Admins accountable to the mobile mod tools roadmap they published. Failure to deliver a promised feature on time will result in the subreddit being returned to ‘Restricted’ mode until the feature is delivered.
And that’s before the protests went down. As reported by TechCrunch:
Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund valued its holdings in Reddit at $15.4 million as of May 31, according to the fund’s monthly disclosure released Friday. That’s down 7.36% from $16.6 million mark at April’s closure and altogether a slide of 45.4% since its investment in August 2021. The updated share value suggests a $5.5 billion valuation for Reddit.
I wonder what that valuation will look like next month.
The Reddit app-pocalypse is here, and the developer of Boost for Reddit, a Reddit client for Android, announced Thursday that the app will stop working after July 1st. Like others, the developer says that the price of the API is too high and is unhappy with other decisions by Reddit:
That price and the prohibition of ads makes it impossible to mantain free users. They want Boost and other third-party apps to move to a subscription model, where our users will have to pay a monthly subscription to use our apps to access reddit and get user generated content which is available for free on the website. In addition, the experience would be incomplete since the API will not return NSFW content anymore.
Third-party apps are shutting down, API pricing has arrived, and protesting mods are begrudgingly giving in. But at what cost?
After receiving a message from a Reddit admin on Thursday saying that its moderators were going to be replaced, Reddit’s Firefox community opened up from being private — but with a temporary new focus on an animal species instead of a web browser.
He shared some details about how he plans to keep his Reddit app alive, and I’ve updated my story with the context. Other popular apps, including Apollo and rif is fun for Reddit, will be shutting down tomorrow.
