Access to the Reddit API is no longer free. The company wants developers of generative AI to contribute to the use of user data.
The online forum Reddit is renowned for having almost every topic discussed in one of its ‘subreddits’, also known as subforums. The website has grown steadily since 2005 and currently has 57 million users, who inadvertently generate a vast amount of data for AI training every day. OpenAI made good use of this with ChatGPT.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman explains to the New York Times that the data is of great value. “But we don’t have to give away all that value to some of the biggest companies in the world for free.”
Reddit has not yet clarified how much companies must pay to access the API. However, it is already clear that, according to the company, “higher usage limits and broader usage rights” are available after payment. The API has been available since 2008.
The API costs could also affect the group of third-party apps that present Reddit in their own way. Platforms such as Apollo, Rif, and Relay have based their ad revenue model on access to the API.
Reddit’s corpus is broad, but also contradictory and incomplete. 62 percent of users are male, and nearly half of the Reddit population is from the United States. Thus, it is not necessarily a representative group in itself, but the amount of data and the breadth of topics will still be invaluable for AI training.
Read also: Reddit hit by data breach after phishing attack.
