Reddit recently implemented significant changes to its API, which resulted in many third-party apps giving up on the platform. And now that the official Reddit app is pretty much the only way to access the social network on the phone, the company wants to push users to pay for its Premium tier.
This week, the Reddit iOS app was updated with an ugly new icon. And if you don’t like it, you’ll need to pay to change it.
Reddit wants to force users to pay for prettier icons
As noted by my colleague Benjamin Mayo, the default Reddit app icon has been changed to a pixelated 8-bit artwork named “OrangeRed.” The Reddit app offers custom icon options for users, but there’s a catch. The custom icons are only available to Reddit Premium subscribers. And guess what? The original icon remains available behind that paywall.
Reddit offers two free icon options “for a limited time,” but neither resembles the original Reddit logo. Most icon options, including the original one, require a subscription. Reddit Premium costs $5.99 per month or $49.99 per year. However, for users subscribing through the iOS app, the subscription is more expensive – $6.99 per month or $59.99 per year.
Top comment by David Cesarino
I never used Reddit to create content. It has been two decades since I regularly contributed anything meaningful to "online communities", and that includes social media.
I learned my lesson when admins of an online forum I regularly contributed to decided to take it down, and a huge amount of content, a true window to the online discussions and even life of the late 1990s and early 2000s, suddenly vanished, gone just like that. From that day on I noticed that if I wanted to "invest" a little more of my time into helping others by writing good helpful content, I might as well do it in my own website, or participate in a project that nobody legally "owns" (in the sense of being able to singlehandedly take it down), like Open Source/Commons projects.
I'm sure most meaningful Reddit content is backed up somewhere on the Internet, but still. Think about all the accumulated knowledge that can be at risk by the decision of one company. Surely it's theirs, but it is still sad.
This move comes as Reddit has been trying to make more money by charging developers who want to use its API to develop third-party Reddit clients. According to Christian Selig, the developer behind the now-discontinued Apollo, the API would cost $20 million per year for an app like Apollo, which had about 7 billion API requests per month.
Users have been abandoning the platform
Since the shutdown of Reddit’s third-party apps, many users have abandoned the platform. A recent report revealed that Reddit’s access metrics have been falling ever since.
In protest, many subreddits have become private and inaccessible to the public. Others said they would stop moderating their subreddits, which could end up hurting Reddit’s revenue from advertisers. The situation escalated to the point where Reddit CEO requested employees not to wear any Reddit merch in public to avoid harassment from users.
As for the Reddit app update with the new icon, it’s now available on the App Store – and good luck with that.
More about Reddit
- Reddit NSFW protestors now given ‘final warning’ by company
- Hackers threaten to leak stolen data if Reddit doesn’t reverse API changes
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