The US Tieba 8000 group blew up and shut down! Google OpenAI used the data for free, and the CEO was scolded by netizens for backstabbing third-party applications

When I woke up, more than 7,000 of the more than 8,000 sub-sections of the "American Post Bar" Reddit had disappeared.

A few months ago, Reddit suddenly started charging for API access, and the price was ridiculously high. The result was that it directly killed third-party clients.

Reddit netizens went crazy, and sub-area administrators also rose up in protest, temporarily or permanently closing the sub-area starting yesterday.

Moreover, as time went by, the wave of protests not only did not subside, but grew stronger.

Reddit does not allow free prostitution data, Apollo closed in tears

Since 2008, the Reddit API has been open to third parties for free.

However, this year, Reddit suddenly made up its mind - our precious and high-quality data can no longer be used for nothing!

The reason behind this is actually related to AIGC.

The popularity of ChatGPT has caused major manufacturers to start training large models in full swing. Where does the high-quality data for training come from? Of course I grabbed it from the Internet.

In the past, Reddit data was used by OpenAI and Google for free to train large language models.

While some of this data is collected in an unstructured way, Reddit’s API makes it easy for these companies to find and organize the data directly.

This year, probably because they saw Musk introducing a charging model for the Twitter API, Reddit was also greedy and imitated it, and began to hold on to its own high-quality data. Price starts from the ground up.

Twitter restricted all third-party clients and applications in January, stipulating that developers cannot use Twitter’s API to create Twitter-like products.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an interview in April that Reddit’s data corpus is “really valuable” and that he doesn’t want the world’s big tech companies to lose a penny. You can easily obtain this huge value of data without spending any money.

In April, Reddit announced it would charge technology companies, whether they are deep-pocketed ones like OpenAI or small developers.

Recently, Reddit has gone a step further and decided to enable an API payment model - in other words, those third-party application developers who need to call the API must also pay.

For example, Apollo’s iOS client developer Christian Selig received a reply: $12,000 for every 50 million calls. This equates to paying Reddit $0.24 for every 1,000 uses.

Judging from Apollo’s 7 billion calls, Selig needs to hand over a huge sum of US$20 million every year if it wants to continue running.

On June 9, Christian Selig had to say with tears: Apollo service will be shut down on June 30 .

The anti-Reddit movement to assassinate third-party applications

"Apollo shutdown incident" seems to be a trigger The request directly triggered an upsurge of protest among Reddit netizens. After all, many netizens also use third-party apps, and charging fees will harm their own interests.

Even if some third-party applications can survive by charging users a low fee, it is equivalent to passing the cost on to Reddit users.

For UGC (user-generated content) communities like Reddit, it’s okay if you don’t pay content creators, but you actually dare to charge them?

If you don't "black" who do you "black"?

A week ago, angry netizens directly launched the "Community Darkening Movement" to oppose Reddit's assassination of third-party applications.

They announced that starting from June 12, some sub-communities will be closed for 48 hours, and some sub-communities will be closed permanently.

Immediately, some of the largest and most active Reddit communities, including r/funny, r/gaming, r/gadgets and r/todayilearned, etc., are all set to "private". In other words, deny access to ordinary users.

Sub-communities such as r/Music, r/gaming, r/science and r/todayilearnd also have more than 30 million subscribers. Some subcommunities, like r/Music, simply plan to protest indefinitely.

Rough statistics indicate that at least 2.6 billion users have been affected.

This week, Reddit has gone into total meltdown.

This is because, unlike most other social media platforms, Reddit relies heavily on "mods", that is, moderators. As long as the moderators want to shut down, the sub-community will shut down. Just close.

In the posts that launched the movement, the moderators told netizens what they could do: file a complaint, post everywhere to spread the purpose of the movement throughout the network, and inform the people around them (and My cat lol) complained about the harm this caused to him.

## Seeing this posture, Reddit was also frightened, and it immediately announced: For APPs for browsing purposes, you can Fees waived.

But for other developers, the situation is still very serious. As Apollo developers announced that they would have to shut down the application at the end of the month, a large number of developers also expressed that they could not survive.

Currently, there are close to 8,000 closed sub-areas, including the recently extremely popular r/ChatGPT.

In the community that is still "alive" for the time being, netizens are also discussing: Should we also join the black community? Activity?

CEO explanation: There is really no way (resolutely not to change)

About this vigorous event In response to the anti-group movement, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman hosted a Q&A event, but it seemed that Reddit had no intention of making any changes to the charging policy, which instead aroused the anger of netizens.

While community moderators may be dissatisfied, Reddit will no longer be obligated to subsidize commercial companies that need to use large-scale data, because Reddit needs to survive first.

According to Huffman, the cost of keeping API access free is too high when the platform itself is struggling to stay afloat.

Additionally, unlike third-party apps, Reddit does not make money.

##Huffman emphasized in an open letter to netizens: Reddit needs to become a self-financing business

Not surprisingly, after the open letter was issued, Huffman was criticized by netizens.

The scariest thing about this whole thing is the way you handled it, the ridiculous price you offered, and your attempts to promote it as a A good move

Huffman emphasized that 90% of third-party apps still have free access to Reddit’s API. Because Reddit can provide free API access to applications as long as they only require 100 APIs or 10 API queries per minute, depending on the client ID.

Additionally, "non-commercial, browser-focused apps and tools will continue to be free to access."

But for others Applications that require higher API access do need to pay.

So apps like Apollo, Reddit is Fun and Sync had to be shut down before pricing took effect.

It was discovered that Huffman also took several photos of Apollo developer Selig during the Q&A event.

Selig claimed that Reddit told other developers that the company was being blackmailed and threatened by him.

When talking about the "blackmail suspicion", Hoffman said: Selig told us one thing and told the outside world another thing. He would also record and leak private phone calls. I really don't know how to do business with him.

Selig fired back: Fabricating a blackmail story will only make our cooperation more difficult, don’t you realize?

The reason for the fee

I have no rice

Reddit’s historical financing exceeds 1.2 billion U.S. dollar, why are you so anxious to make money all of a sudden?

In an email sent to employees on June 7, the CEO stated that about 5% of employees (about 90 people) are being laid off.

He also said that Reddit will reduce the number of hirings from an early plan of 300 people to about 100 people within the year.

Because the economic environment is not good, it is no longer news that technology companies are reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

Although Reddit is a private company and does not have public financial information, the layoff and recruitment plan shows that Reddit is indeed short of money now.

I don’t want AI companies to use data for free

##OpenAI In the study, it was revealed that Reddit was one of its numerous resources used to train underlying artificial intelligence models.

When you think about the fact that the most popular AI giant with the least money needs to use its own data, and you don’t have much money in your own account anymore, if you are the CEO of Reddit,

what will you do?

Reddit CEO Hoffman said: "We have a lot of 'real conversations' on the site, a lot of things people would only say in therapy or support groups. , and never even reveal the truth to outsiders. We will not provide these high-value things for free to big companies."

But why is the price so high? Directly Make some third-party application developers unable to survive?

According to a post by Apollo's developer, the main reason why Reddit's new fees are so high is that their pricing is aimed at AI companies with deep pockets and need a lot of training data, and it is punitive. sexual.

But such pricing accidentally hurts those third-party application developers who have little money and must also rely on Reddit data.

But unlike those AI companies that “suck” Reddit, these third-party applications can provide high value to Reddit users and communities.

To some extent, Reddit makes it difficult for them to live, and it is also hurting themselves.

We are preparing to go public in the second half of this year, but the valuation has dropped by 40%

##There is another important reason why Reddit is so anxious to make money.

It is reported that this year Reddit will also restart its IPO plan that has been dormant for several years.

Originally, Reddit planned to go public in 2021. At that time, the CFO was replaced by a new one just to prepare for the IPO.

As a result, we encountered an economic winter and the capital market has almost frozen to this day.

One of Reddit’s own shareholders, Fidelity, has seen its internal valuation of its Reddit shares fall by 40% as of April this year.

Now that none of our shareholders are optimistic about our shares, public investors will definitely not buy it when it goes public.

So if Reddit wants to be able to list itself at a higher valuation in the future, improve profitability and give investors confidence, this is what they should do most now.

That’s still the same sentence, what would you do if you were the CEO?

Hot discussion among netizens

Because Reddit has a huge number of users, this "black version" movement also sparked a lot of discussion.

Support API charging

Some netizens pointed out the key points The key, he said, is for Reddit to find a way to receive reasonable fees from the exploitation of big companies.

Reddit costs money to operate, so they either have to charge users, or users have to watch advertise.

There are also comments from Reddit’s point of view, thinking that either users should contribute 10 to 20 US dollars per month to support the company’s operation. , or you have to find advertisers or external investors, but now users just want a product that generates no revenue and provides services completely for free.

Allowing the platform to continue operating at a loss is not a long-term solution, because the maintenance cost is really not low. The company has to pay its employees because they have to support their families. This way the company has to make money, but how can the company make money if the vast majority of users don't pay?

This is actually no problem, it’s completely understandable.

##Too greedy and does not support charging

Social media needs to encourage and even reward users for posting rather than punishing users. I don’t understand why Reddit wants to keep its user base away from this community.

For a community that can generate effective discussions in cyberspace, if the company behind it wants to make large-scale profits, it will harm the platform itself. Corporate pursuits of profit have made such communities increasingly rare.

Since many users cannot access the content they want to see after the "black version", it is better to turn to "decentralization" "Based" products completely eliminate similar troubles, and thoughtfully provide everyone with alternatives for each commonly used platform.

Netizens who work in technology companies said that companies doing this is naked greed. As long as they can make money, these companies will Abandon the core values ​​of the company and products.

The reason Reddit dares to do this is because of the lack of effective competition. It is the largest "forum" in the world. Without it, users have no other choice.

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