Sites such as Reddit provide access to its application programming interface (API) for independent developers who want to build their own application associated with the service.
Chat platform Reddit suffered a major outage on Monday, as third-party developers objected to the San Francisco-based company raising fees charged to them to access its data.
The incident is related to the passion currently being sparked by generative artificial intelligence, a technology that requires large databases, including, for example, users’ discussions on social networks.
“Reddit’s dataset is so valuable,” Reddit chief Steve Hoffman said in an interview with The New York Times in April. “We shouldn’t be giving all that value to the biggest companies in the world for free.”
Sites such as Reddit provide access to its application programming interface (API) for independent developers who want to build their own application associated with the service.
But companies like Google or OpenAI also use it to feed their language models into the infrastructure of their chatbots, Bard and ChatGBT respectively, which can talk to humans and generate various texts including articles and poems. Translations and even legal pleadings.
Last Friday, Reddit raised the prices of its programming interface.
“Reddit has to be a standalone company, and to do that we can no longer support commercial entities that require data at scale,” Steve Hoffman said in a statement on the site.
However, developers consider that the new prices are too high. According to one of them, Christian Selig, he will have to pay Reddit $20 million a year to continue offering his Apollo app.
Thousands of forums have been temporarily closed by their moderators in protest of the price hike, which has led to problems accessing the platform for users.
The number of reports of malfunctions rose to more than 45,000 on the specialized “Down Detector” website.
Shortly afterwards, Reddit said it had seen “improvements across the site” and that it “expects the issue will be resolved for most users.”
Twitter, which was acquired by Elon Musk in the fall, also removed free access to its API in April.
