Over the past ten years, Reddit has become one of the cornerstones of the popular Internet domain, taking a seat among the elite council composed of sites like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Amazon, and YouTube. Unfortunately, it appears as if the company is about to spoil its own party.
For those who happen to use Reddit’s official mobile app, prepare for a big disruption. Given that the mobile app is universally hated due to its overwhelming ads, many developers have created more efficient alternatives such as Infinity (Android) and Apollo (iOS), for users to easily browse and comment without intrusion.
However, these third-party applications have existed for so long because Reddit has a public API to access its database. Yet recently, the site made a broad announcement regarding sweeping changes when it comes to requesting this data, similar to other platforms recently, like Twitter.
In the announcement, Reddit basically said it’s going to start billing applications that make a certain number of requests per month. The creator of Apollo stepped out and told the public that according to the math,
“50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I could have ever imagined.
Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I’d be in the red every month.”
To make matters more difficult, Reddit is also implementing changes in which third-party apps lose access to subreddits in the NSFW category. According to developers of the popular Android application RIF,
“Removal of sexually explicit material from third-party apps while keeping said content in the official app. Some people have speculated that NSFW is going to leave Reddit entirely, but then why would Reddit Inc have recently expanded NSFW upload support on their desktop site?”
If Apollo can’t afford to pay for access to the new premium API, no one else can. This will easily alienate hundreds of thousands of regular Reddit users and may implode the official app altogether.
For now, anyway, you can still go and use Old Reddit.