Like Wikipedia, Reddit is one of the wonders of the online world. Its founders once described it as “the front page of the internet”, which is perhaps a bit hyperbolic but not entirely wide of the mark. It is, after all, the 11th most visited website in the world (and the sixth most visited in the US). Many of my friends, colleagues, acquaintances and contacts use it every day, and for some it is their favourite online site.
If this comes as a surprise to you, then here’s what you need to know. Reddit is basically a bulletin board on steroids. It’s a news-aggregation, content and discussion website.
Users (“Redditors”) post text, links, images and videos on the site which are then voted up or down by other users. Posts are organised by subject into user-created boards called “communities” or “subreddits”. Content is moderated partly by employees of Reddit (the company), but more importantly also by community-specific moderators, who are not Reddit employees.
Reddit worked reasonably well on desktop and laptop computers, but was clumsy for mobile users, which led to the development of apps which made using the site easier. The most popular of these for Apple devices is Christian Selig’s Apollo, which interacts with the Reddit site via a free API (application programming interface) provided by Reddit.
But as of 30 June, Apollo will be no more. Why? Because Steve Huffman, Reddit’s CEO, has decided that access to the API will no longer be free and Selig estimates that under the proposed new charging regime it would cost him $20m (£16m) a year to operate his app. “Going from a free API for eight years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days,” he said. “That’s a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it’s just not economically feasible. It’s much cheaper for me to simply shut down.”
Many other Redditors were similarly discombobulated by Huffman’s decision to impose charges and so many of Reddit’s biggest communities (subreddits) went “dark” or began blocking new posts on 12 June as a protest against the proposed pricing changes. This included subreddits that had between 20 and 40 million users each.
So this is a real shitstorm – and one that, for a change, does not involve Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. Huffman seems determined to ride it out, largely because he doesn’t have many options. On the financial side, despite its huge scale and online prominence, Reddit is still not profitable and it looks as though it will go for an IPO later this year – and nothing depresses a share price like the absence of a credible path to profitability. “Expansive access to data has impact and costs involved,” says a company statement. “We spend multimillions of dollars on hosting fees and Reddit needs to be fairly paid to continue supporting high-usage third-party apps.”
Quite so. But when you encourage people like Christian Selig to build useful apps (and businesses) because your own are inadequate, it’s unfair and counterproductive to suddenly drop such a financial bombshell on them at such short notice.
The most interesting aspect of the controversy, though, is the effrontery of Huffman’s attempt to seize the moral high ground. What’s bothering him is that the data on Redditors’ interests and behaviour over the decades that is stored on its servers constitutes gold dust for the web crawlers of the tech giants as they hoover up everything in training their large language models (LLMs). Providing a free API makes that a cost-free exercise for them. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Huffman told the New York Times. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
Note the sleight of mind here. That “corpus of data” is the content posted by millions of Reddit users over the decades. It is a fascinating and valuable record of what they were thinking and obsessing about. Not the tiniest fraction of it was created by Huffman, his fellow executives or shareholders. It can only be seen as belonging to them because of whatever skewed “consent” agreement its credulous users felt obliged to click on before they could use the service. So it’s a bit rich to hear him complaining about LLMs which were – and are – being trained via the largest and most comprehensive exercise in intellectual piracy in the history of mankind. Or, to coin a phrase, it’s just another case of the kettle calling the slag heap black.
What I’ve been reading
Selfie indulgence
Margaret Renkl’s You’re Pointing Your Camera the Wrong Way is a lovely essay in the New York Times on the destructive impact of our self-facing cameraphones.
Right turn ahead
An interesting Substack post by John Ganz, Blood and the Machine, looks at the swerve in Silicon Valley towards “reactionary modernism”.
From the archive
Eichmann in Jerusalem – 1 is the first article in Hannah Arendt’s famous 1963 New Yorker series on the trial of the Nazi official.
