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

In a Reddit post last month, CEO Steve Huffman had announced, “Effective July 5, 2023, we will limit access to mature content via our Data API as part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails to how explicit content and communities on Reddit are discovered and viewed,”.Huffman had further noted that the change in Data API will not impact any moderator bots or extensions. 

A report by Vice noted that Reddit’s move is aimed at forcing users to adopt the official Reddit app instead of third-party apps. The report noted that third-party apps don’t just include 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 on the market such as Google’s Bard, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat were trained using Reddit’s API data.

In the post written last month, Huffman reiterated the need for API fees, saying “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.”

Redditors have been in arms about the company’s decision to charge exorbitantly for API data which is used by third-party apps to provide features that are not available on the official app and have been used by moderators for managing their communities. 

Many subreddits even went to the extent of organizing a 48-hour-long protest against the new API changes. Some of these communities started posting pornographic content or taking their subreddits as NSFW as a form of protest against the changes brought in by Reddit. NSFW subreddits cannot be advertised and further age-related restrictions are placed on entering the subreddit.

Updated: 07 Jul 2023, 12:02 PM IST