Gaming & Social Media
The Minecraft Subreddit Is Being Left Behind By the Developers
Reddit seems to say to developers, “Hey, if you want our awesome data and content, you gotta pay up!”
In some of my past stories, I’ve talked about different stuff related to Minecraft. You can find the links to those stories at the end of this post. Today, I wanna touch on the recent changes to Reddit’s API and how they’ve affected the Minecraft subreddit.
What’s going on with Reddit?
So, Reddit is basically saying to developers, “Hey, if you want our awesome data and content, you gotta pay up!” Can you believe it? They want these developers to cough up a whopping $12,000 for every 50 million requests they make. It’s crazy, right?
I heard this news from the creator of a cool app called Apollo, and they were pretty bummed out about it. They said, “Last month, Apollo made 7 billion requests, which would cost us around $1.7 million per month, or $20 million per year.”
By the way, Reddit is mostly owned by a company called Advance Publications. They’re the parent company of Conde Nast and have big shares in Charter Communications and Warner Bros. Discovery.
Anyway, let’s talk about APIs. They’re how third-party folks get access to data from big internet companies and connect their apps. Reddit has this awesome ecosystem of apps, plugins, and services created by all sorts of developers, from amateurs to pros.
Lately, API costs have been getting a lot of attention. Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter and new AI-powered tools became popular, people started to notice. You see, these new AI programs use fancy language models that train themselves using a ton of stuff from the internet, like posts from Twitter and Reddit.
People and developers got pretty angry when Twitter announced they’d charge $42,000 for 50 million requests. And guess what? Even though Reddit said they wouldn’t go that far, they still want a hefty $12,000.
Here’s the funny part. Apollo said they only paid about $166 for the same number of requests from Imgur, an online image-sharing service. So, you can understand why they’re not happy about Reddit’s pricing. Usually, Reddit makes most of its money from ads.
But compared to giants like Facebook, Snap, and Pinterest, they’ve had a tough time making money from their active user base. And you know what? Reddit seems pretty determined to stick with its API pricing. The Apollo developer even said they had no problem with Reddit’s post about it.
How has this impacted the Minecraft subreddit?
The Minecraft peeps at Mojang are bailing on the game’s biggest subreddit. They made a viral post on June 27 to announce their exit, right after the subreddit got flooded with John Oliver stuff.
Reddit is gonna implement a new policy on July 1 where they charge third-party apps for using their API. People are pissed about it because the rates are insane ($0.24 for every 1,000 API requests).
Popular apps like Reddit is Fun and Apollo are shutting down because of this, and tons of subreddits are going private or finding other ways to protest.
Now the main Minecraft crew is also leaving Reddit because of all this drama. They won’t be posting changelogs for the Java Edition anymore. But they want to make it clear that it’s their own decision, not some official thing from Mojang, Xbox Game Studios, or Microsoft.
If you’re a Minecraft fan and wanna reach out to the devs after they’ve left Reddit, they suggested using a contact form at feedback.minecraft.net.
Most fans are happy about the move, but a few think it’s because the mods of r/Minecraft loosened up in protest of the API changes. The devs shut that down, saying it’s not the mods’ fault. They also said they haven’t talked about coming back to Reddit if things change, but who knows?
Final Words
Honestly, it’s not looking good right now.
Reddit admins have been cracking down on the protests hard.
They even removed some mods who were fighting against the API policy.
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With that being said, thank you for reading my post, and have a good one.
Here are a few of my previous stories relating to Minecraft I believe you will enjoy:
References
Reddit will charge hefty fees to the many third-party apps that access its data.
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