Upcoming Reddit blackout and the future of third-party applications

Users on one of the biggest social media sites in the world are planning a revolt. 

Reddit, which boasts 430 million active monthly users, recently updated its policies for its application programming interface (API), a type of software interface that allows two applications to communicate with one another. The associated price increases will significantly affect the status of third-party applications users to access the site, which many users rely on to access features that are unavailable in the official Reddit app, particularly for moderation.

In protest, over 1,500 subreddits — including some of the biggest on the site — have announced their intention to “go dark” for 48 hours beginning on Monday, June 12, setting their communities to private so their content won’t be accessible to the wider internet. 

Stevie Chancellor, an assistant professor in the College of Science and Engineering, speaks to the impact this blackout — and the API changes that prompted it — will have on the internet. 

Stevie Chancellor, Ph.D.

“Reddit's decision to charge a hefty fee for API access is harmful to creative use of its API and data.  To be clear, there are companies who take advantage of Reddit's dataset and work to benefit only themselves — think of large-scale AI models that use scraped data from all over the internet to make for-profit models. That said, there are a great number of justified parties who should have free and easy API access — researchers and students, people who make tools that make moderators' jobs easier, and any Redditor who uses a third-party app that provides a more accessible browsing experience.

Our past research showed that moderator labor makes up a notable portion of Reddit's actual monetary value. Reddit now has to contend with monetizing the work of moderators that keeps subreddits safe and friendly — and the important tools that mods use to make their lives easier. In some ways, the challenges facing Reddit mirror what Wikipedia experienced surrounding a similar decision to create an enterprise API to stop rampant use of its volunteer-derived resources by businesses that take advantage of this.”

Stevie Chancellor is an assistant professor in the department of Computer Science & Engineering in the College of Science and Engineering. As a part of the GroupLens laboratory, she builds and critically evaluates AI that detects and intervenes in dangerous mental health behaviors in online communities. Her work touches on a number of topics related to mental health online, such as governance, content moderation and ethical AI. 

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