{"id":501332,"date":"2023-07-24T15:40:30","date_gmt":"2023-07-24T13:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=501332"},"modified":"2023-07-24T15:43:11","modified_gmt":"2023-07-24T13:43:11","slug":"reddit-takes-over-big-subreddit-that-protested-api-changes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/internet\/501332-reddit-takes-over-big-subreddit-that-protested-api-changes.html","title":{"rendered":"Reddit seizes major subreddit that protested API changes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reddit has taken over a significant subreddit that participated in the mass protest against the platform’s API fees, The Verge<\/strong> reports<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Control of r\/malefashionadvice<\/strong><\/a>, which has over 5.4 million subscribers, has been shifted to the official Reddit admin account u\/ModCodeofConduct, who has reopened the subreddit.<\/p>\n

The admin account has also called on subreddit members<\/strong><\/a> to volunteer to take over as moderators.<\/p>\n

The Verge<\/strong><\/a> spoke to one of the former mods of the subreddit, who confirmed Reddit had removed their privileges on Thursday.<\/p>\n

The mods of the subreddit had encouraged their users to switch to Discord and Substack.<\/p>\n

They were warned by u\/ModCodeofConduct that they would be replaced if the subreddit was not made public again.<\/p>\n

The subreddit was among thousands that went dark in mid-June to oppose the API rules, which made it exorbitantly expensive for numerous third-party apps to connect to Reddit’s post feed and functions.<\/p>\n

Before the changes, Reddit provided unrestricted access to the API. It argues that this cost it millions of dollars in infrastructure to maintain.<\/p>\n

However, Reddit’s fees are well above those of similar platforms.<\/p>\n

Reddit is charging developers $0.24 per 1,000 API calls, working out to $12,000 per 50 million.<\/p>\n

Even at half the rate, a fee proposed by Apollo founder Christian Selig, Reddit’s API pricing would be 36\u00d7 as expensive as Imgur.<\/p>\n

Despite strong opposition, Reddit went through with the changes at the start of July, leading to the shutdown of third-party apps like Apollo and Reddit is Fun<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Reddit uses Code of Conduct as justification for takeovers<\/h2>\n

Reddit regards public communities that have been made private “abandoned” and has repeatedly claimed that it has simply been enforcing the moderator Code of Conduct by taking over the subreddits.<\/p>\n

“This is not new because of the protests,” the platform told Engadget<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

To bypass Reddit’s use of the Code of Conduct, numerous other subreddits have started posting adult-only content.<\/p>\n

In addition to preventing the subreddits from qualifying as being “abandoned”, it stops Reddit from monetising the communities with ads.<\/p>\n

At the height of the API protest, nearly 9,000 communities switched to private.<\/p>\n

According to a Twitch channel<\/strong><\/a> that live-tracks the number of communities still protesting, 1,951 were still dark at the time of publication.<\/p>\n

That compares with 2,210 public communities that were private on 3 July 2023.<\/p>\n

\n

Now read: Goodbye Twitter \u2014 Elon Musk’s big switch to “X” app begins<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reddit considers public communities that have been made private in protest against its exorbitant API fees “abandoned”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":495965,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[54371,8045,88108,86965,87223],"class_list":["post-501332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-apollo","tag-reddit","tag-reddit-api-fees","tag-reddit-is-fun-rif","tag-reddit-protest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501332"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501332"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":501388,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501332\/revisions\/501388"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/495965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}