Reddit has had a “blackout” as subreddits protest new fees to use the Reddit Application Programming Interface (API).
This will mean Reddit will charge developers of third-party programs, and due to new pricing, Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Sync, and ReddPlanet have announced their shutdowns.
The API of Reddit is used by members of the online community that have built their own apps to access the platform.
The new fees for accessing data, means the usages are too expensive for many third-party apps.
Many of the biggest communities on the site have gone private and aren’t expected to return for at 48 hours.
Some of the subreddits that were affected are: r/music, r/gadgets, and r/todayilearned. Each has millions of followers. This has also cause major outages.
On Monday, over 45,000 outages were reported on Downdetector, Reddit unable to cope with the shutdowns. Another major outage was also reported on Monday.
This is the latest fallout, with CEO Steve Huffman unwilling to allow AI chatbot companies to have free access to the site, which would allow them to perfect the models.
Through APIs ChatGPT, and Google’s Bard have used large amounts of data from sites like reddit to refine their content.
Twitter has also prevented developers and third-party websites to access the API free of charge, to boost revenues.
“Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidise commercial entities that require large-scale data use,” Mr Huffman said.
Moderators have shut down many chat rooms, causing the site to sputter for a few hours.
It was reported over 7,000 groups had gone dark to oppose the new fees.
Reddit has advised it was “observing improvements across the site and expect issue to recover for most users.”
