Can someone explain what's going on at Reddit to me?
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I don't pretend to understand the most basic thing about how APIs work, and how they, whatever they are, interact with a platform such as Reddit. I've always thought of Reddit as a huge forum with moderators in charge of various sub-reddits.
Now, I gather there's some money controversy going on regarding the subs.
Can someone (and please, type real slow) explain this to a non-geek like me.
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Your understanding is correct. The moderators are the traffic cops that keep reddit subs healthy and clean. Similar to TNCR Mods, akshully. The Reddit API is indeed like the highway system that allows Reddit and 3rd party apps to connect, exchange content, etc, blah, etc......
Oddly enough there is a subreddit nicknamed ELI5 (Explain Like I'm Five) that I subscribe to. In this case, their answer of why there is an API protest (and why many subs are "going dark" in protest), includes points such as:
- The worries are about Reddit charging much more money (for the API) to connect with other apps. Specifically, charging more money than Reddit said they would.
- This change make it much harder for moderators to keep their subs safe.
- The change is too fast and doesn't let 3rd party apps have time to react.
- Somewhat related... I think there is a concern about AI content and how to control it (there are lots of bots, AI, automated whatevers... out there that both try to inject content into reddit [mostly bad] but also automatically manage content by auto-flagging and moderating spam [good]. Further, there's been an increase in ChatGPT generated posts.
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The NY Times has a good summary: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/business/media/reddit-moderators-api-protest.html
Highlights:
- 65% of the 9,000 subs (message boards) went "dark" for 2 days, in protest
- Protest is over Reddit charging large-scale companies for access
** like Google, OpenAI (ChatGPT), Microsoft...which uses Reddit content to train its AI models
** The protest concern is more about how it could kill off 3rd party apps, such as Apollo that is used on iOS to be a user-friendly Reddit interface (would cost Apollo $20 million annually), and how it would hurt tools that moderators use to manage freewheeling discussions on their sub
