What Would Aaron Swartz Think Of Reddit’s Ridiculous New Direction?
from the closing-off-the-commons dept
Aaron Swartz was, perhaps by technicality, a co-founder of Reddit. The more complete story is that he was working on a different project, infogami, that got merged into Reddit, which was created by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, but it’s been said that part of the deal was that all three would get founder credit. Years later, Huffman insisted that Swartz wasn’t really a co-founder and shouldn’t be called such. But, still, Swartz’s views on access to information were certainly a compelling part of early Reddit’s existence.
As you likely know, Swartz believed in open access to information, which likely contributed to his efforts to free academic research, leading to his arrest and the ridiculous criminal charges against him, which likely contributed to his dying by suicide.
Given all of that, I do wonder what Aaron would think, over a decade later, of his former company that he helped grow, locking up information under new ridiculous API terms.
Seemingly taking a page from Twitter (and some other companies) seeing (1) API access as a possible revenue stream, and (2) ridiculously freaking out over generative AI tools being trained on their data, Reddit announced it April that it would begin charging for API access.
A few weeks ago, the developer of Apollo, a popular Reddit app, said that Reddit was pricing the new API in a way that would cost his firm $20 million per year, a price so ridiculous that Apollo has now announced it’s shutting down the app. In many ways this is reminiscent of Twitter cutting off all the popular third party apps that users relied on (and also the ridiculous pricing of Twitter’s new API).
Between this and Facebook instituting paid verification it feels like parts of the internet industry are copying Elon’s bad ideas.
Huffman did a Reddit AMA (natch) late last week, and doubled down on the API fees. Much of Reddit is up in arms over this. There are users, subreddits, and moderators who are all protesting the changes. And a few of the small subreddits I’m in are talking about decamping for other sites.
Huffman’s responses to the AMA also really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, including making a bunch of claims about the developer of Apollo that felt unfair and mean-spirited.
And, really, this whole thing is ridiculous. I can understand efforts to offer a paid API for more direct access to certain features, but it should be standard practice to allow third parties to build apps that interact with your service. Hell, Reddit didn’t even have a mobile app for many, many years and was totally dependent on third party apps (or web access).
It feels like so many of these efforts are really about shutting down access to the open web, locking up data and information in their various siloes. It’s against the very spirit of Aaron Swartz, who helped create one version of RSS among other things, and believed in not just open access to information, but that the internet was designed so that people could build on-top of others’ work, enabling everyone to build better and better solutions.
Instead, we’re seeing companies like Twitter and Reddit looking to lock up information, joining companies like Meta which have long had a somewhat siloed view of how information should work.
Perhaps we need a “Bluesky-like” project for Reddit, building a more decentralized, open protocol for communities of interest. Arguably, that was Usenet/NNTP, but perhaps it’s time for someone to either reinvigorate that or create something new that is more modern, and can be more connected either in a federated manner or a truly decentralized one. There are, already, a few attempts at building a Reddit-like service on ActivityPub, including Kbin and Lemmy (which, because they’re both in the fediverse, interoperate). Incredibly, over the weekend (in another Elon-like move), Reddit temporarily banned a subreddit about Kbin, though as people started pointing out the hypocrisy, the subreddit was allowed to return.
Playing around with Lemmy over the weekend made me think it has real promise — and along those lines wonder what Huffman thinks he’s doing at Reddit. Yes, the company is desperate to complete it’s planned IPO, and yes, to do so he needs to look like the company can become profitable. But how’s he going to do that if the site’s most committed users are leaving?
Already, thousands of subreddits have gone dark, and while the blackout is supposed to be for 48 hours, some subreddits, including the massive r/music have said they’ll stay dark until the API issue is fixed:
So what would Aaron Swartz think of all this? I think he’d be out there leading the protest, spinning up a Lemmy server, and making sure that the information continues to flow, rather than get locked up.
Filed Under: aaron swartz, access to information, ai, api, federation, fees, lemmy, open information, protocols, steve huffman
Companies: reddit