The Reddit Protest

On April 18th, 2023, Reddit announced they would be making some changes to their developer terms of service. The article, titled "Creating a Healthy Ecosystem for Reddit Data and Reddit Data API Access," touched on several topics including the fragmented nature of the previous terms of service, expansion to native moderation tools, and new premium API access tiers.

It was this last point that pushed the developer of Apollo, the largest third party Reddit app for iOS, to make a post saying that he would not be able to continue running his app after having obtained the official figures for his level of API access. He reported that Reddit had given him a figure of $0.24/1000 API requests, which was later confirmed publicly by Reddit in an AMA held on June 16th. A figure which when multiplied by the 7 BIllion requests his app was making to the API the previous month totaled an outrageous $1.68 Million.

Worried that moderation and accessibility tools, as well as third party browsing apps were going to be priced out of existence, the Reddit community did the only thing it really could do and organized a protest . Starting on June 12th, subreddits were going to go private for 48 hours, though many are continuing to stay offline even as I’m writing this. Many were claiming that if their third party app went away, then they would stop using Reddit altogether. Some seemed to think that if Reddit didn’t back down, then they would witness the death of Reddit in real time.

I wrote a draft of this post on the 9th trying to marshal my thoughts on the situation and predict how I thought things were gonna go. Like a lot of other people I was skeptical that the protest was going to have any real impact. Though this wasn’t because of the 2 day limit. For me, it was the fact that we never really seemed to have the numbers. In the same post where the Apollo dev revealed the $0.24/1K request figure, he said his users had made 7 Billion requests over the previous month with the average user making 10.6K requests per month. Doing the math, that tells us that his total monthly user base is somewhere on the order of 660K users. In 2019 Reddit reported they were seeing 430 Million monthly active users. That number is unbelievably high.

The Apollo app is the largest third party Reddit app on iOS. Other third party apps likely don’t have nearly as many monthly users but let’s assume there’s 30 third party Reddit apps that all have on the order of 500k monthly users. That’s 15 Million monthly active users or 3.5% of Reddit’s 2019 monthly user base, likely closer to 3% these days. That would be a significant amount of revenue to lose but even that figure assumes that everyone who used a third party app would stop using Reddit entirely. The reality of the situation is that, Reddit has done their calculations and determined they can make this move and survive as a company, even if they have to take a minor revenue hit in the short term.

Anyone who uses Reddit knows that, while the opinions of people on the site tend to be loud, they don’t tend to be representative of the population as a whole. For example, Reddit tends to be overwhelmingly left leaning when it comes to US politics, but US election results continually show that the division is very close to 50/50 across the voting population. This is the first time it’s occurred to me that the loud opinions on Reddit, even the ones that are able to reach the front page, don’t seem to be representative of even the Reddit population itself.

It’s amazing how fast the situation went from solidarity among the developers, mods, and general user base, to, within the span of two weeks, almost entirely back to business as usual. I won’t be going back. Seeing the way the admins treated the Apollo dev, really left a sour taste in my mouth, and I’d rather not support that if possible. It's time to find something else to fill the hole, though the list of "ethical" social media websites seems to be quite short. Maybe it'll be Lemmy, maybe it'll be something else. We'll just have to wait and see.