Reddit has been a great place for socializing, finding and talking about the content you like. The structure at which it operates is different from other media is that you follow communities surrounding ideas instead of people. So you probably would not find any celebrities there. I too have been using the app for nearly 4 years and it occasionally features some great stuff.
However, things are not going that great on Reddit right now. A lot of communities or subreddits has decided to private themselves, or black out in protest. The main reason for this was because of the API prices changes that affected third party apps.
Also read – Bae Suzy to sing theme Song for HYBE’s Girl Group Audition Program “R U Next?”
What is Reddit API?
So Reddit API is basically the source code or server code that is used by some third party apps to use the same infrastructure on their apps. This is actually a quite common practice. Most of the Reddit users don’t actually use the Official Reddit app because the third party apps provide way more features and fluency than the official one.
Simply stated, the official app is horrible. And the company does not even try to fix most of the problems. If you use the app right now there is a high chance most videos will just refuse to play. This is really unacceptable from a billion dollar company. But the users didn’t need to put up with all the this because of the better apps available.
What is The Protest Against?
The problem arised when the API costs were tweaked. The developer of Apollo App, stated that according to recent adjustment, he will have to pay $20 Million Dollars to keep using the API. Which was definitely not feasible. Not just Apollo, but many other apps were have to be shut down.
The communities in reddit are moderated by regular people who are not paid for it. They just moderate these communities just because they want to see these communities grow. These API changes also break a lot bots that were automated and helped with moderation. Simply stated, the users feel ripped off with the decision because the app focuses much more on community as compared to other platforms.
Apollo is shutting down. And so are thousands of subreddits from 12 to 14. It is yet to see if the protest will yield anything.
