Reddit to start charging for access to its API

SAN FRANCISCO: Social discussion forum Reddit has announced that it'll begin charging for use of its API (Application Programming Interface).

Reddit's API will continue to be available for free to developers who want to create apps and bots that help people utilise Reddit, as well as researchers who want to study Reddit for solely academic or noncommercial purposes, reports TechCrunch.

According to Reddit's co-founder and CEO, Steve Huffman, companies that extract data from Reddit without providing any benefits to its users will now be required to pay a fee, the report mentioned. "It's a good time for us to tighten things up. We think that's fair," Huffman was quoted as saying. According to the report, Reddit is seeking avenues to monetise its extensive collection of user-generated content. This move comes at a time when the platform's content has been in high demand for training prominent text-generating machine learning models like OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4. Reddit has around 430 million monthly active users in more than 1.2 million special interest communities, of which 138,000 are active as of 2019, the report said. Meanwhile, Reddit has introduced a new feature that splits text and video posts into separate feeds. The company announced the new feature, mentioning that video content on the platform will be pulled into the "Watch feed" view, while text content will appear in the "Read feed".