Refusal of data was prostituted by Google OpenAI and others, the US version of Tieba Reddit charged for API access, and nearly 8,000 communities such as ChatGPT rose up to protest

**Source:**Xinzhiyuan

Original title: The 8000 group of the US version of Tieba blew up and shut down! Refused data was prostituted by Google OpenAI, and the CEO was scolded by netizens: backstabbing third-party applications

**Guide:**ChatGPT and other nearly 8,000 communities exploded, and netizens set off an upsurge of opposing Reddit's assassination of third-party applications! The CEO said: Sorry, but a fee must be charged.

When I woke up, more than 7,000 of the more than 8,000 subsections of the "American Post Bar" Reddit had disappeared.

A few months ago, Reddit suddenly started charging for API access, and the price was ridiculously high. As a result, it directly killed third-party clients.

Netizens on Reddit directly exploded, and the administrators of the sub-sections also rose up one after another. Since yesterday, the sub-sections have been temporarily or permanently closed in protest.

Moreover, with the passage of time, the wave of protests has not subsided, but has intensified.

Reddit does not allow prostitution data, Apollo closes with tears

Since 2008, the Reddit API has been freely available to third parties.

However, this year, Reddit suddenly made up its mind - our precious high-quality data can no longer be prostituted for nothing!

The reason behind it is actually related to AIGC.

The popularity of ChatGPT has caused major manufacturers to start training large models one after another. Where does the high-quality data for training come from? Of course it was grabbed from the Internet.

In the past, Reddit data was used by OpenAI and Google to train large language models for free.

While some of this data is collected in an unstructured manner, Reddit's API makes it easy for these companies to find and organize the data directly.

And this year, Reddit was also greedy when they saw Musk set up a charging model for the Twitter API. They followed suit and began to raise prices on their own high-quality data.

Twitter restricted all third-party clients and applications in January, stipulating that developers cannot use Twitter's API to create Twitter-like products

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an April interview that Reddit's data corpus is "really valuable." data.

In April, Reddit announced it would charge tech companies, whether deep-pocketed companies like OpenAI or smaller developers.

Recently, Reddit has gone a step further and decided to open the API payment model-in other words, those third-party application developers who need to call the API must also pay.

For example, Apollo's iOS client developer Christian Selig received a response of $12,000 per 50 million calls. That equates to paying Reddit $0.24 for every 1,000 uses.

Judging from the 7 billion invocations of Apollo, if Selig wants to continue to operate, it needs to pay a huge sum of 20 million U.S. dollars every year.

On June 9th, Christian Selig had to say with tears: the Apollo service will be shut down on June 30th.

Set off anti-Reddit assassination third-party app movement

The "Apollo shutdown incident" seemed to be a fuse that directly ignited the upsurge of protests by Reddit netizens. After all, many netizens also use third-party apps, and if they charge fees, it will also harm their own interests.

Even if some third-party apps can survive by charging users a low fee, it is equivalent to passing the cost on to Reddit users.

And for UGC (user-generated content) communities like Reddit, it’s fine if you don’t pay content creators, but how dare you charge them?

Who do you "black" if you don't "black"?

A week ago, angry netizens directly launched the "Community Blackening Movement" to oppose Reddit's assassination of third-party applications.

They announced that from June 12, some sub-communities will be closed for 48 hours, and some sub-communities will be closed forever.

Immediately, some of the largest and most active Reddit communities, including r/funny, r/gaming, r/gadgets, and r/todayilearned, were made private. In other words, deny access to normal users.

Subcommunities such as r/Music, r/gaming, r/science and r/todayilearnd all have more than 30 million subscribers. Some subcommunities, like r/Music, simply plan to protest indefinitely.

According to rough statistics, at least 2.6 billion users have been affected.

This week, Reddit has been in a total meltdown.

That's because, unlike most other social media platforms, Reddit relies heavily on "mods," or moderators, who shut down mods if they want to.

In the posts launching the campaign, the moderators told netizens what they can do: file a complaint, spread the purpose of the campaign across the Internet, and complain to the people around them (and their own cat lol) about the harm caused to them. harm.

Seeing this posture, Reddit was also frightened, and it immediately announced that it can waive fees for apps for browsing purposes.

But for other developers, the situation remains grim. As Apollo developers announced that they had to shut down the app at the end of the month, a large number of developers also expressed that they could not survive.

Now, close to 8,000 subsections have been closed, including r/ChatGPT, which has been extremely popular recently.

In the community that is still "alive" for the time being, netizens are also discussing: Should we also join the blackening activity?

CEO Explanation: There is really no way (resolutely not to change)

Regarding this vigorous off-group campaign, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman hosted a question-and-answer event, but it seems that Reddit has no intention of making any changes to the charging policy, but it has aroused the anger of netizens.

Although community moderators may be dissatisfied, Reddit will no longer be obliged to subsidize commercial companies that need to use large-scale data, because Reddit needs to survive first.

According to Huffman, the cost of keeping an API free to access is too high when the platform itself is struggling to stay afloat.

Also, unlike third-party apps, Reddit is not profitable.

Huffman emphasized in an open letter to netizens: Reddit needs to become a self-financing business

Not surprisingly, after the open letter was issued, Huffman was sprayed miserably by netizens.

The scariest thing about this whole thing is the way you handled it, the ridiculous amount you charged, and the way you tried to make it a good thing

Huffman emphasized that 90 percent of third-party apps still have free access to Reddit's API. Because Reddit offers free API access to apps as long as they only need 100 API or 10 API queries per minute, depending on the client ID.

Additionally, "non-commercial, browsing-focused apps and tools will continue to be free to access."

But for other applications that require higher API access rates, they do need to pay.

So apps like Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync had to be shut down before the pricing went into effect.

It was discovered that during the Q&A event, Huffman also took a few photos of Apollo developer Selig.

Selig claims that Reddit told other developers that the company was being blackmailed and threatened by him.

When talking about the "blackmail suspicion", Hoffman said: Selig said one thing to us, and another thing to the outside world. He also recorded and leaked private phone calls. I really don't know how to do business with him.

And Selig shot back: Making up a blackmail story will only make our cooperation more difficult, don't you realize?

Reason for charging:

My house is out of rice

Reddit's historical financing exceeds 1.2 billion US dollars. Why is it so anxious to make money all of a sudden?

The CEO said in an email to employees on June 7 that about 5% of the workforce (about 90 people) is being laid off.

He also said Reddit would reduce its hiring to about 100 people this year, down from an earlier plan of 300.

Because of the bad economic environment, it is no news that technology companies have reduced costs and increased efficiency.

Although Reddit is a private company and has no public financial information, the layoff plan shows that Reddit is indeed short of money now.

I don’t want AI companies to prostitute data

OpenAI revealed in its research that Reddit is one of the vast resources it uses to train underlying AI models.

When you think that the hottest and cheapest AI giant needs to use its own data, and the money in your own account is running out, if you were the CEO of Reddit, what would you do?

Reddit CEO Hoffman said: "We have a lot of 'real conversations' on our site, things that people would only say in therapy or in a support group, and never even confide in outsiders. We are not going to give these high-value things to big companies for free.”

But why is the price so high that some developers of third-party applications can't survive?

According to a post from Apollo’s developer, the main reason Reddit’s new fees are so high is that their pricing is punitive for AI companies that have deep pockets and need a lot of training data.

But such pricing has mistakenly hurt those third-party application developers who have little money and must also rely on Reddit data.

But unlike those AI companies that "suck blood" on Reddit, these third-party applications can provide high value to Reddit users and communities.

In a way, Reddit is hurting itself by keeping them alive.

Preparing to go public in the second half of this year, but it is estimated to drop by 40%

There is another important reason why Reddit is so anxious to make money.

It is reported that this year Reddit will also restart the IPO plan that has been silent for several years.

Originally, Reddit planned to go public in 2021. At that time, the CFO was changed again, just to prepare for the IPO.

As a result, the economic winter has hit, and the capital market has almost frozen to this day.

One of Reddit's own shareholders, Fidelity, has seen its internal valuation of its Reddit stake drop by 40% as of April this year.

Now my own shareholders are not optimistic about their own shares, and when it goes public, public investors will certainly not buy it.

Therefore, if Reddit wants to be able to go public at a higher valuation in the future, improve profitability, and give investors confidence, it is the most important thing they should do now.

That's the same sentence, what would you do if you are the CEO?

Netizen Hot Discussion

Because of the huge number of users on Reddit, this "black version" movement has also aroused a lot of discussion.

Support API charges

Some netizens pointedly pointed out that the key point is that Reddit must find a way to receive reasonable fees from the exploitation of large companies.

Reddit has costs to operate, so they either have to charge users money, or users have to watch ads.

There are also comments from the perspective of Reddit, thinking that either users pay 10 to 20 dollars a month to support the operation of the company, or they have to find advertisers or external investors, but now users only want a service that does not generate income and provides services for free. product.

It is not a long-term solution to let the platform continue to operate at a loss, because the maintenance cost is really not low. The company has to pay employees because employees have to support their families. In this way, the company has to make money, but how can the company make money if the vast majority of users do not pay?

This is actually not a problem, it is completely understandable.

Too greedy, does not support fees

Social media needs to encourage and even reward users for posting instead of punishing users, don't understand why Reddit wants to keep its user base away from this community.

For a community that can generate effective discussions in cyberspace, the companies operating behind it want to make large-scale profits, which will hurt the platform itself. Corporations have made such communities less and less in pursuit of profits.

Since many users cannot access the content they want to watch after the "black version", it is better to switch to "decentralized" products to completely avoid similar troubles, and also considerately give everyone an alternative solution for each commonly used platform .

Netizens who work in technology companies said that what companies do is blatant greed. As long as they can make money, these companies will abandon the core values of the company and products.

The reason why Reddit dared to do this is because of the lack of effective competition. It is the largest "forum" in the world. Without it, users have no other choice.

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