No more NSFW? Reddit blocks access to porn, obscenity through third-party apps

In a Reddit post last month, CEO Steve Huffman announced, “Starting July 5, 2023, we will be using our Data API as part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails for discovering clearer content and communities on Reddit. will limit access to mature content. And observed,” Huffman further noted that the change to the Data API will not affect any moderator bots or extensions.

A report in Vice states that the move by Reddit is aimed at forcing users to adopt the official Reddit app instead of third-party apps. The report states that third-party apps include not just porn, but also other types of explicit content, including sex education, conversations about sexuality and harm reduction.

reddit announced in April that it planned to allow third parties access to its application programming interface, or API, data. In an interview with The New York Times, Huffman had argued that popular chatbots in the market such as Google’s Bard, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat were trained using Reddit’s API data.

In a post written last month, Huffman reiterated the need for the API fee, saying, “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and in order to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that largely Data usage is required.”

Redditors have been against the company’s decision to charge exorbitant fees for API data, which is used by third-party apps to provide features that are not available on the official app and by moderators to manage their communities. is used to.

Several subreddits even went to the extent of organizing 48-hour-long protests against the new API changes. Some of these communities began posting pornographic content or taking down their subreddits as NSFW as a protest against the changes Reddit had brought. The NSFW subreddit may not be advertised and has age restrictions on entering the subreddit.

Updated: July 07, 2023, 12:02 PM IST