(San Francisco) Chat platform Reddit suffered a massive outage on Monday as many third-party developers protested the San Francisco company’s rising fees for accessing its data.
The incident is linked to the current craze for generative artificial intelligence, a technology that requires large databases – like user chats on social media.
“Reddit’s body of data has a lot of value,” Reddit boss Steve Huffman said in an interview with the New York Times in April. “We shouldn’t be giving all this value to the biggest companies in the world for free.”
Sites like Reddit provide access to their application programming interface (API) to independent developers who want to build their own application linked to the service.
But companies like Google or OpenAI can also use it to feed their language models, the underlying structure of their “chatbots” – Bard and ChatGPT, respectively – capable of conversing with humans and generating dissertations as well than poems or pleas.
On Friday, Reddit increased its API prices. “Reddit needs to be a stand-alone business and to achieve that we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data,” Huffman said in a statement on the site.
But the new prices are deemed too high by publishers. One of them, Christian Selig, has calculated that he would now have to pay $20 million a year to Reddit to continue to offer his third-party application, Apollo.
Thousands of forums (dubbed “subreddits”) have been temporarily shut down by their moderators in protest, causing problems for users accessing the platform.
The number of fault reports rose to more than 45,000 on the specialized site Downdetector.
A little later, Reddit indicated that they were “seeing improvements throughout the site” and “expect the issue to be resolved for most users”.
Twitter, acquired by Elon Musk in the fall, also ended free access to its API in April.