With the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) that threatens to disrupt how people find information online and a massive boycott brewing in reaction to a move the legacy social media platform took to bolster itself, the company, which counts an obscene 57 million daily users, is finding out that existence as a tech darling doesn’t get any easier even after you successfully scale.
Reddit, the homepage of the internet, is facing a difficult situation. With 57 million daily users, the platform is looking to go public this year, but a mass protest has been sparked by developers who are unhappy with the company’s decision to start charging for its application programming interfaces (APIs). Hundreds of subreddits have taken themselves private and several third-party apps are turning their backs on the website.
The move to charge for APIs is a response to the rise of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, which are built and can only improve by ingesting vast quantities of data. This has turned the mutually beneficial relationship between Reddit and services like Google on its head. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman stated in a Q&A that the company was rethinking its stance of giving its corpus of data away for free, and that a lot of information posted by users over the years will be packaged up and sold.
The boycott organizers said the charges are a step toward killing other ways of customizing Reddit, and many of the site’s volunteer moderators reportedly use third-party apps. The situation could have implications for crypto as a social movement, as it shows the power of a company to make unilateral decisions that severely affect users.