Reddit to cut five percent of staff and faces user backlash over API fees

Reddit is present process a serious restructuring that can have an effect on its workforce and developer group.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, an electronic mail by firm chief Steve Huffman states that Reddit will lay off 90 staff. 90 doesn’t appear to be a giant quantity, however contemplating that Reddit has roughly 2,000 staff, 90 provides up to roughly 5 percent of its workforce.

The electronic mail additionally revealed that Reddit is scaling again its hiring plans for this yr, aiming to add solely 100 new employees as an alternative of the 300 it had initially projected. “We’ve had a solid first half of the year, and this restructuring will position us to carry that momentum into the second half and beyond,” Huffman mentioned within the electronic mail.

The firm had filed paperwork to go public, and reviews from earlier this yr recommended that Reddit plans to go public within the second half of 2023. It additionally introduced that it might begin charging firms for entry to its utility program interface (API). Reddit doesn’t need different firms to give you the chance to prepare their LLMs with its knowledge totally free, and needs a slice of the pie. Big names like Google and OpenAI have been utilizing Reddit to present preliminary steerage to their AI providers. In response, Reddit introduced that it’s going to introduce a brand new premium entry level for third events to entry Reddit’s APIs, with pricing anticipated to be break up into tiers primarily based on firm measurement.

But this coverage has sparked outrage amongst many builders and customers who depend on third-party apps to entry Reddit, as shared by Engadget. Some of these apps, equivalent to Apollo for Reddit, Narwhal and Reddit is Fun, have warned their customers that they can not afford to pay for Reddit’s API and could have to shut down. Christian Selig, the only developer of Apollo for Reddit, mentioned that it might value him $20 million a yr to hold his app operating as is.

In response, dozens of subreddit communities throughout numerous matters have introduced that they’ll go darkish beginning on June twelfth as a type of protest. Some of them plan to keep offline for 48 hours, whereas others intend to stay inactive indefinitely till Reddit addresses the difficulty.

Reddit isn’t the one tech firm that’s shedding staff. Apple, Spotify, Google, Microsoft and many extra are in the identical boat.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, Via: Engadget