A while back they announced a plan to monetize their API usage. (If you don’t know the term, it’s essentially instructions for how your computer talks to theirs, one machine to another.) Now, this by itself isn’t unheard of; plenty of sites charge for API calls. Except for two things. 1: Reddit has never done this in its entire history, and 2: they are planning to charge literally two to three orders of magnitude more than other sites do.

That first point is especially important, for this reason: Reddit’s API being free has given rise to a large and robust community of third-party app developers. Third-party apps make a lot of API calls, especially because Reddit’s back-end is kind of trash and requires you to. One of the most popular third-party app developers estimated it was going to cost him on the order of twenty million dollars per year to keep doing what he had already been doing for ages for basically free.

Now, at first you might think, “so the heck what?” Well, it gets deeper. Those third-party apps include things like accessibility functionality for disabled folks, which no official access point has. Not their trash new-reddit website, not their even-more-trash official app. (I’m not being hyperbolic in saying their app is garbage; the screen breakdown of their official app is more ads and white-space – individually – than content.) Being abled myself, I don’t know what features people are looking for, but the general consensus from people who do need them is that Reddit has none. So by effectively pricing out third-party apps, they’re also cutting off disabled folks who rely on those apps for any kind of access at all.

You might think “I’m not disabled; so the heck what?” Well, it gets even deeper. Those third-party apps include a lot of functionality that moderators of large, popular subreddits rely on to do their jobs. Their… volunteer… jobs. Which drive a lot of traffic through the site and are effectively Reddit’s entire product. (Remember, you are not their customer. Advertisers are their customers. Your eyeballs are their product.) So not only are they cutting off entire swaths of the disabled population, they are also hamstringing the people who create most of the value of their website.

This might not affect you directly if you’re not a mod, but it absolutely will affect your experience of Reddit as a whole. Remember, unpaid mods are the ones Reddit puts the entire burden on to police their site clean of things like t-shirt scammers, onlyfans spammers, and other nefarious individuals. And now Reddit is breaking all of the tools they use to do that. So get ready for your experience of Reddit to become an absolute dumpster-fire, since those bots, scammers, and criminals are going to have damn near free rein once spez’s changes go through.

Oh yeah. In the midst of all this, /u/spez, their CEO, has been caught lying about interactions with third-party devs multiple times, ignoring community concerns in public forums, and threatening mods who protest any of this. I myself got “reopen or you will be replaced” threat letters for both of my relatively small subs.

So… yeah. Reddit is sinking, and people are looking for lifeboats.