Don’t love the framing of this paragraph from TechCrunch. It’s not that they’re charging for the API. That’s understandable and obvious, and we all wanted the platform to survive. I’ll be happy to volunteer to contribute to lemmy development/server costs/app development one day. It’s that they’re grossly overcharging for the API to such an extreme degree that paid subscriptions to third party apps actually lose money.

In April, Reddit announced its plans to start charging developers to access data through its API. The move was obvious — to restrict third parties from accessing Reddit data that can help build text-generating machine learning models such as OpenAI’s GPT 4. Developers building apps and bots to assist people using Reddit and researchers who wish to study the platform for noncommercial purchases were among the few exceptions. However, as a result, third-party apps, including popular Reddit client Apollo, found it difficult to pay for those charges and decided to go offline. Various popular subreddit moderators came in support of those apps and developers and started protesting against the API pricing move.