Reddit Users Go Dark in Protest of Policy That Could Shut Out Third-Party Apps Transcript

More than 6000 communities on the popular social networking forum, Reddit, have gone dark as moderators protest the company’s decision to charge some third-party apps for the use of Reddit data. The move is controversial with many of the apps having to shut down as a result. But the CEO of Reddit doesn’t appear to be backing down anytime soon. Reddit often refers to itself as the front page of the internet, and is also one of the most visited websites on the web.

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Bobby Allyn covers business and technology for NPR and he joins us now. Bobby, it’s great to have you here.

Hey, Jeff.

I feel like we should start with a glossary of terms for our viewers who aren’t as familiar with this stuff as we are. Reddit is the discussion forum, and subreddits we should say are the discussion threads, and there are subreddits on everything from gaming to gardening, from sports to science. Okay. Help us understand how this protest started and what these moderators are trying to get from it.

Sure. Reddit has been around for almost 20 years, and it’s been one of the most popular online forums on the web, as you mentioned. And for the longest time, Reddit didn’t have its own official mobile app, so that meant lots of third-party app developers introduced apps where people can browse Reddit on their phones, and the only way they can do that is if Reddit allowed access to that data from these third-party apps. That’s how it’s worked for years and years. But recently Reddit said, “You know what? We should start charging those third-party app developers for access to our data,” and the bills can be as much as $20 million a year, and these are small, scrappy app developers. I talked to one guy who runs an app called a Apollo, he’s based in Nova Scotia, and he’s the only person who runs this app. He can’t afford $20 million a year.

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In response to this, thousands and thousands of subreddits, so these discussion groups, decided to go dark. Meaning if you try to access one of these forums today, you can’t, you just can’t access it, and this affects people who don’t use Reddit. For instance, if you Google something about a baseball game, something about your favorite movie, something about skateboarding, you’re not going to get results from Reddit, and Reddit is a wealth and wealth of information and conversations about practically everything. By having this many discussion groups go dark, it’s really affecting large swaths of the entire internet.

On that point, companies that are developing artificial intelligence technology are using data from Reddit to basically teach AI how to talk and how to have human interactions. What better way to do that than to use data from a discussion forum? But is Reddit not getting paid by the likes of OpenAI and Microsoft when they use their data?

Steve Huffman, who is the CEO of Reddit, has justified the new charges this way. He has said, “Popular tools, like ChatGPT, scrape Reddit for its wealth of conversations, for its wealth of data, in order to train its AI models,” as you just mentioned. And Steve Huffman says, “Look, I run Reddit. This company has been around for almost 20 years. It has never been profitable.” He is trying to take the company public later this year, so he has an eye toward trying to make investors feel good about potentially investing in Reddit. One way to do this, come up with another revenue stream. And he says these big companies that are running these large language models… like OpenAI, like Google, like Microsoft… they should be paying for all of the data they’re accessing from Reddit. That’s how Huffman has justified these new charges. That said, small developers of third-party Reddit apps say, “Hey, how about us? Because we can’t afford a $20 million bill a year. And if you charge us that, we’re going to go out of business.”

$20 million a year is real money. How is this going to be resolved? Because the people who love Reddit love it because it hasn’t been profit driven, it wasn’t really seen as a commercial entity; but now the CEO, as you say, is trying to change course here.

It’s hard to know how this is going to shake out in the end. We do know that Reddit has said they aren’t really interested in coming to the negotiating table about these new charges. The blackout protest, so the boycott, is only going to last 48 hours. We’ll see if they try to extend it a little longer to try to get more leverage to bring Reddit to the negotiating table. But assuming they don’t, I think we’re going to see large parts of Reddit move to other online forums, and that is going to be a real hit to this company. Because I think last time I checked, it’s the 20th most popular website on the web. It’s a real powerhouse.

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To really drive a stake into the heart of one of the most popular forums on the web is a really big deal. And like I said, this doesn’t just affect people who use Reddit. It affects people who Google anything they want to Google every day, and stumble upon something on a Reddit forum that actually was enlightening or actually was pretty interesting. If you’re going to have many parts of this community move to other websites, it’s really going to divide-up the internet in a way that is going to affect all of us.

Bobby Allyn covers business and technology for NPR. Bobby, thanks so much for being with us.

Thanks, Jeff.