Reddit boycott: What does AI and crypto have to do with it?

The well-known social media platform Reddit is currently in an uncomfortable position following a protest initiated by developers, but what do AI and crypto have to do with it?

Let’s take a detailed look at what’s going on. 

The protest against Reddit: do AI and crypto pose a threat? 

As anticipated, Reddit is currently in a difficult situation. Indeed, we see that the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) is threatening to revolutionize the way people search for information online, challenging Reddit’s traditional role as a primary source. 

Not only that, the social media platform is also facing a massive boycott in response to a controversial decision made to strengthen its position. 

Despite having a huge daily user base of 57 million and having experienced considerable success over the years, apparently all this is not enough for Reddit to maintain its status as a “tech treasure.” 

Thus, Reddit’s current situation highlights the fact that the foundation on which the platform was built, namely advertising and data mining, has always been fragile. 

We also see that a massive protest against Reddit is currently underway. Specifically, the protest was initiated by developers who feel betrayed by a recent strategic decision of the company. 

Namely, that of introducing fees for the use of its application programming interfaces (APIs), which are essential for accessing the site and its data if you want to create something on it. 

As a result, hundreds of subreddits have gone “private” in protest, and numerous third-party apps are turning their backs on the website. All this comes as Reddit is trying to become a public company later this year.

The latest decisions of Reddit’s CEO that have put the platform in crisis 

As we know, Reddit, known as the “homepage of the Internet,” is a website that allows people to aggregate news, memes, and form communities to discuss any topic. 

Being a substantial website, with some of its semi-autonomous subreddits having tens of millions of active users, Reddit has accumulated a vast amount of valuable data and information that is constantly being updated.

For several years, Reddit has allowed web search engines to index its discussion threads, creating a mutually beneficial relationship between the site and services such as Google. 

However, the emergence of “large language models” (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, has changed this dynamic. These models are designed to improve and learn only through the assimilation of large amounts of data, including all the content available online.

In a Q&A session, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman revised the previous policy of freely sharing the site’s “body of data.” Now, Reddit will charge app developers for access that was previously free. 

In addition, it appears that some of the information posted by users over the years may be packaged and sold, although this may just be speculation of which there is no certainty. 

Huffman expressed some reasons for this decision, while other reasons can be easily guessed.

If the boycott against Reddit is successful, how much will this affect crypto?

But what is the relationship between what was said above and crypto? We see that, depending on how the situation develops, there could be implications for cryptocurrencies as a social movement. 

Undoubtedly, a company’s ability to make unilateral decisions that heavily influence users could be a significant advantage for a movement that promotes transparency, open access, and user control. 

However, to a certain extent, the situation could also work against cryptocurrencies if the boycott is successful. 

This is because, in the event that platforms such as Ethereum only wish to be the foundation of a better Web, a situation that requires people to create and maintain alternative applications and users to migrate and start from scratch on a new social platform, this could become an unappealing option for those seeking greater security. 

In fact, it would be much easier for people to use mass protests as tools to push companies such as Facebook and Google to improve aspects such as privacy. 

Finally, we see that unlike Facebook, Reddit has arguably remained more true to its roots, allowing many communities to self-regulate and maintaining a more permissive stance on what users can post. 

In this sense, despite being a huge platform run by companies using the same data-mining techniques developed by Zuckerberg, there has always been a kind of affinity between the world of Reddit and cryptocurrencies.