Reddit

Reddit filed a lawsuit in California state court against Anthropic, alleging the AI company made over 100,000 unauthorized requests to Reddit's servers to collect user posts and comments without permission. The suit alleged Anthropic circumvented Reddit's robots.txt file and refused to engage in licensing negotiations, unlike Google and OpenAI which entered formal licensing agreements. The case raised questions about intellectual property rights and data protection for user-generated content.

In May 2024, Reddit established a Public Content Policy that locks down access to Reddit data without a formal agreement. The policy requires data licensees to honor content deletions by users, provides compliance tools to automate deletion processing, and explicitly restricts access to private messages and non-public account information. Reddit stated it would never license non-public content like private messages or browsing history.

The Federal Trade Commission launched a non-public inquiry into Reddit's sale, licensing, and sharing of user-generated content with third parties to train AI models. The inquiry was disclosed on March 14, 2024, just days before Reddit's planned IPO. Reddit stated it was 'not surprised' by the FTC's interest given the novel nature of these agreements.

Reddit entered into data licensing agreements worth $203 million over 2-3 years, including a $60M/year deal with Google and approximately $70M/year deal with OpenAI, granting access to user-generated content for AI model training. The deals were announced around the time of Reddit's IPO filing in February 2024, raising concerns about monetizing user content without explicit user consent or compensation.

During the June 2023 API pricing protests, when approximately 8,500 subreddits went private or restricted, some communities labeled themselves NSFW in continued protest. Reddit administrators responded by removing entire moderation teams from protesting subreddits, citing violations of the Moderator Code of Conduct. CEO Steve Huffman dismissed the protest, saying 'It's a small group that's very upset' and telling employees internally that the protest 'will pass.'

In June 2023, Reddit implemented API pricing changes that effectively killed third-party apps like Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync. The pricing ($12,000 per 50 million requests) was prohibitively expensive. Over 8,000 subreddits participated in blackout protests. CEO Steve Huffman compared volunteer moderators to 'landed gentry' during the controversy.

Reddit laid off approximately 5% of its workforce, equivalent to 90 employees, in 2023. According to The Wall Street Journal, CEO Steve Huffman said the company would subsequently reduce hiring to about 100 from the initial plan of 300 for the year 2023. The layoffs came shortly before the controversial API pricing changes that sparked community protests, suggesting workforce reduction was part of preparation for the company's IPO.

On April 18, 2023, Reddit announced it would charge for API access at rates that would cost major third-party app Apollo $20 million annually, forcing it to shut down on June 30, 2023. Despite 8,500+ subreddits going private in protest (June 12-14) and accessibility concerns from r/Blind moderators, CEO Steve Huffman refused to negotiate or revise pricing. The rapid 30-day implementation timeline was criticized compared to industry standards. Third-party apps were widely used by moderators for organization, spam blocking, harassment detection, and by disabled users for accessibility. The change prioritized Reddit's IPO preparation over community welfare and platform accessibility.

In June 2020, Reddit banned r/The_Donald, a pro-Trump subreddit with nearly 800,000 subscribers, along with approximately 2,000 other communities. The ban cited repeated policy violations including hosting and promoting hate speech and harassment campaigns.

On June 5, 2020, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian resigned from the board of directors, requesting to be replaced by a Black director. In an open letter, he urged the company to ban hate speech and hate communities. Reddit subsequently appointed Michael Seibel, CEO of Y Combinator, as his replacement, making Seibel the first Black board member in Reddit's history.

In May-June 2015, under interim CEO Ellen Pao, Reddit enacted its first official anti-harassment policy and became the first major social media platform to ban revenge porn and unauthorized nude photos. Reddit also shut down 5 subreddits that promoted harassment based on race, weight, and sexual orientation. Pao subsequently faced a massive harassment campaign and a petition with over 200,000 signatures calling for her removal, and resigned on July 10, 2015.