Neither will the internet be the same

Why has Reddit become so dark? A comment from a user who was frustrated by Apollo and other apps after the Apollo API shut down

Apollo, an iOS app that became a rallying point for the recent protests against Reddit’s imminent API pricing, no longer loads any content from the platform. I see a spinning wheel when I open it. Developer Christian Selig confirmed to me that Reddit is the one that turned things off, not him: “would have been nice to have been given a time,” he says in an email to The Verge.

The popular app, bacon reader, shows an error message for me when I try to use it. When I tap the “Tap to refresh” link, I just get the same error message.

Sync, an Android app, has stopped working too, displaying this message: “Error loading page: 401.” When we published this article, one of our staff can still see the content on the app even though they aren’t logging in. He was unable to log into his account.

A group of users organized a protest to try and get the company to change their policies. But despite more than 8,000 communities going dark, Reddit held its ground, and now some apps are officially kaput. Narwhal, Relay, and Now are all still available, even if they become subscription-only in the future.

When the company announced the API change in April, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times one of the main reasons for the move was that it would compel companies using Reddit’s archives for AI training to pay up. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Huffman said. Some of the largest companies in the world do not need to be given all of that value.

This week, I asked if he’d be using the site after Apollo closes. “Honestly, not sure,” he said. I’m certainly using it less.

It is the kind of shake-up that makes users realize the value they give to tech companies for free, even if they only mean to give it to the community. A poster on one subreddit dedicated to saving the third-party apps broke it down succinctly: “Never forget how Reddit began as an empty website, which its founders populated with hundreds of fake accounts to give the illusion of activity and popularity—Remember that without us, the users, Reddit would be nothing ButHoffmans digital dollhouse. (Disclosure: WIRED is a publication of Condé Nast. Advance Publications, Condé Nast’s parent company, holds an ownership stake in Reddit.)

To protest Reddit’s decision, mods of nearly 9,000 subreddits switched the groups to private earlier this month, depleting the vibrancy of conversation on the site, and even impacting Google search results. The dustup would not pass because it was such a bad thing, according to a memo leaked to employees by Hoffman. “Like with Twitter, it’s not a big collapse when a social media website starts to die, but it is a slow attrition unless they change their course,” Mir said.

But charging for the API doesn’t affect just companies like OpenAI, Google, and others that are using Reddit discussions to train artificial intelligence systems. After the change, popular apps like Apollo and Reddit announced that they’d shutter rather than pay the fees, which anApollo developer estimated would cost some $20 million annually.

Maybe it wasn’t an active fear, not a doomsday everyone knew was coming, but still one that almost seemed inevitable: The magic of Reddit is gone. As of today, June 30, 2023, several mobile apps for browsing the platform are closing up shop ahead of a new initiative from Reddit to charge for access to its API. It’s the culmination of weeks of revolt from users and mods upset that the move will price out the third-party developers responsible for the apps that help make the community what it is. Even if the decision is rolled back, it has changed the culture of Reddit forever. The internet was shifted with it.

It is not a lot of fretting over the fact that a change in an application programming interface is not really a change. It indicates a growing awareness of how communities can have their work used for money-making ventures on the internet. Specifically, ones powered by artificial intelligence.