How Reddit broke Reddit, or why some of your favorite Reddit apps are about to shut down

If you've been long enough on the internet, you've definitely stumbled upon Reddit one way or another, either as an active member of the community or as a regular netizen that's simply browsing the interwebs. 

The spiritual successor to the internet forums of the (g)olden days, Reddit is a community-driven content aggregator that also passes as a social media these days. What becomes popular and what not is determined by Reddit users, or redditors, who can 'upvote' or 'downvote' any community-submitted content, including links, pictures, videos, GIFs, comments, and other kinds of content. 

Reddit has become the 'almighty' hub for different online communities, encompassing both major and the nichest topics. Thanks to its partition into different communities, dubbed "subreddits", the platform makes it easy for people with similar interests to communicate and interact with user-submitted content as well as with one another. There are more than 2 million subreddits right now, of which 130,000 are considered "active" communities. 

In fact, if you're looking for something extremely specific, adding the simple "reddit" suffix to your regular Google search will more often than not deliver more accurate results. Reddit comments, in particular, often hold the answers to even the most specific questions one might have. 

In May 2023, Reddit was the 8th largest website in the world, as per Semrush, merely toppled by online giants like Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia. 

How did Reddit come to be, exactly?

During a brainstorming session at Paul Graham's startup incubator Y Combinator, University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian came up with the basic idea for Reddit, which was quickly nicknamed "the front page of the Internet" by Paul Graham. Shortly after, the general formula behind the platform was outlined, and in June 2005, Reddit was launched, marking the beginning of an era. For a deeper dive into Reddit's origins, check out this excellent Vanity Fair piece on the platform's inception. 

Huffman is Reddit's current CEO and plays a vital part in the ongoing drama, while Ohanian remained on board until 2018, but left the company in order to pursue other. Currently, Reddit is privately owned, with media companies Advanced Publications and Tencent Media owning 30% and 5%, respectively. 

Reddit was initially eyeing an IPO in 2021, Reddit is currently eyeing an IPO (initial public offering) in late 2023, which will make it a publicly traded company. 

Now, how does Reddit make money, exactly?

Just like most websites and social media platforms, Reddit sells ad space. Back in 2021, when plans for the IPO were initially disclosed, it was revealed that Reddit's advertising revenue was up to $100 million a quarter, but forecasts have it that Reddit might earn up to a billion dollars per quarter by 2024. 

Aside from advertising, Reddit also makes money by offering a premium tier, dubbed Reddit Premium. It costs $5.99 a month or $49.99 a year, allowing users to enjoy an ad-free Reddit browsing experience, along with some extra functionalities, like custom app icons, avatars, premium awards and coins to give out, and so much more. Reddit has said that as of late 2021, it has more than 300,000 paying Premium users, which add up more than $24 million in revenue. 

Finally, we are getting to the inception of the latest drama, and the thing that started the fire was the change of Reddit's API policy, which allow Reddit chatbots and third-party Reddit clients to function properly. Reddit first declared its intention to change the way its APIs work in April 2023 in a lengthy post on the subreddit dedicated to... Reddit. Yeah, it's weird like that.

First off, what's API? The abbreviation that stands for "application programming interface" basically is the link that allows third-party apps to display content from Reddit, allows users to post comments, interact with other user's comments, upload content, and pretty much anything you'd normally expect out of a third-party Reddit client. Basically, the API is the "key" that lets a third-party app inside the Reddit stronghold.  

With that out of the way, the changes in the APIs command the following:

This most important change––the introduction of the paid API–– essentially cuts off free access to Reddit for third-party apps, like Apollo for Reddit, Boost for Reddit, Reddit is Fun, Sync for Reddit, Relay for Reddit, Baconreader, Narwhal, and many more. 

Each of the aforementioned apps would need to pay a hefty monthly premium in order to have access to the Reddit API, and as we'll see later, the pricing is excessive at best. 

All of these changes are objectively aimed at making it impossible for third-party Reddit apps on iOS and Android to function, which would fuel Reddit users to the platform's official (and feature-poor) mobile app. 

So, now that we've established that Reddit is phasing out the free access to its data API, what will the consequences be for all the third-party apps across both iOS and Android? Things aren't looking good at all, and sadly, most apps will have to close shop. 

A few weeks after the announcement for the change of Reddit's business model, the company started making calls to the developers, and things quickly got ugly, with most popular third-party apps revealing that their apps will cease to function on June 30, a day before Reddit's new official API pricing model goes in full effect.

As revealed by Christian Selig, u/iamthatis, the developer behind one the most popular Reddit apps on iOS, Apollo, Reddit has revealed its projected pricing of $0.24 per 1,000 API calls.

This would seemingly cost Mr Selig roughly $2 million per month based on Apollo's current usage (more than 7 billion API calls per month), or easily more than $20 million per year. Apparently, that's way more than what Apollo currently makes per month, so the app's fate is pretty much sealed.

In a lengthy blog post that received an enormous visibility and garnered over 217,000 upvotes, Apollo dev Chris Selig explains what's going to happen with its app come June 30.

Relay for Reddit, developed by u/DBrady, will also be killing off its app:

The seeming lack of dialogue and Reddit's disdain to make any amends or reverse some of its changes send a clear message to the regular Reddit user:

It was never a dialogue; it was always a monologue. There's no democracy in big business, only dictatorship. 

By trying to improve its revenue and boost the usage of its lackluster mobile app, Reddit is shooting itself in the foot, alienating users that have lived through one too many scandals and dramas through the years.

As a Reddit user myself, I can't help bu bemoan the decision to kill of third-party apps. Apollo and Boost have been some of my most used apps in the past couple of years by a long shot, so having to adapt to the new situation will take some getting used to. Who knows, I might switch to Lemmy after all. 

On a final note, I will paste two paragraphs from u/BuckRowdy's open letter that really touched me in the best way possible: