Anyone who's active online in the last year has probably heard of the whole mess that Reddit created when it announced its API pricing. Subreddits went dark, some for longer periods, but the social networking site refused to budge. Now, Reddit is taking the fight to AI companies directly.
Reddit Against AI Companies
When Reddit decided to implement new API prices for access after being free previously, the platform received backlash from users, moderators, and third-party app developers. The cost was so high that some apps decided to just shut down.
The ultimate goal for the pricing is so that AI companies will have to pay for accessing Reddit data to train their AI models, but it seems that all it did was incite an uproar. The company is finally taking a more direct approach this time.
Reddit recently met with top generative AI companies to talk about payment deals for the use of its data. The company even has conditions in place, wherein search crawlers from Google and Bing would be blocked if a deal is not made, as per Ars Technica.
That means that when someone looks for answers on the search engines, Reddit results will no longer appear on the list of links, which can dramatically reduce the number of visitors on the site. However, the company thinks that Reddit can survive without search.
It is possible that blocking search crawlers is just Reddit's way of forcing a deal out of the tech giants. The forum, after all, is regarded as a good source of information for a lot of matters, and it would hurt both Google and Bing to lose it.
Even Google's Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan admits that Reddit is a valuable source of information for users, which became apparent when the site's subreddits decided to go private or go to read-only mode in protest.
"Many of you may wonder how we have a search team that's iterating and building all this new stuff and yet somehow, users are still not quite happy," says Raghavan. Reddit provides answers that are usually based on experience and expertise, which explains why it's valuable.
The Damage Has Been Done
Arguably, this should have been what Reddit did in the first place, especially before the site faced blackouts and continuing protests. The company has made a lot of enemies and lost important contributors due to the move.
Due to the new pricing, third-party apps that users have gotten used to had to shut down since the prices became way too high. Reddit tried to fix this by exempting certain apps that help users and moderators who suffer from disabilities.
Moderators continued to protest despite these changes, which resulted in some losing their positions. According to Kotaku, Minecraft developers have also left the forum, specifically the r/Minecraft subreddit due to moderation changes.
Eventually, all of the subreddits have gone public again, which Reddit CEO Steve Huffman predicted. Still, a lot of issues and controversies could have been avoided if the company left third-party app developers alone and gone for AI tech giants instead.
