BlackCat, a ransomware group, said it was behind the February "sophisticated and highly-targeted" phishing attack on Reddit. They claim to have stolen 80GB of data, including contact information for employees and advertisers, and threatened to release it publicly if they do not get a $4.5 million ransom, as well as a rollback of the API pricing changes that caused users and moderators to protest.
Following a poll by redditors, the r/gifs, /pics, and r/aww subreddits have reopened, with a new rule in place mandating that only media involving comedian and Last Week Tonight host John Oliver is allowed.
Over 7,000 subreddits—including major ones like r/funny, r/aww, r/gaming, r/music, and r/science—began a two day protest from June 12th to June 14th on account of the changes to the Reddit API, changing the subreddit visibility to private, preventing other users from seeing posts in the subreddit. However, some subreddits chose to protest by preventing new posts instead of fully going private. The protesting moderators and users allege that the changes are hostile to moderators, who would lose the powerful third-party moderation tools they rely on, as well as to the users who are reliant on third-party mobile apps in order to browse Reddit. The API changes would force those users to use the official Reddit mobile app, which has several accessibility-related shortcomings and lacks keyboard-only navigation.
On June 8, Selig announced that he would shut down Apollo on June 30. In a Reddit post, he alleged that Huffman told employees that Selig was blackmailing the company out of $10 million; Selig provided audio recordings between himself and a Reddit employee disproving the claim. His announcement was accompanied by other similar statements, including from RIF developer Andrew Shu, who cited Reddit's "hostile treatment of developers building on their platform" and a high API cost. Other third-party Reddit apps, such as Sync for Reddit and ReddPlanet, have also announced that they will shut down.
On May 31, Christian Selig, the developer of the third-party Reddit client Apollo, said that he was quoted US$12,000 for 50 million requests and could be forced to pay US$20 million per year in order to continue to operate. Selig stated that he could not pay Reddit's pricing and was unsure of how to even pay it.
On April 18, 2023, Reddit announced it would charge for its API service amid a potential initial public offering. In spite of those changes, Huffman said that the API would continue to be available for free for developers who create moderation tools or researchers who use Reddit's data for academic purposes. Announcing the changes, Reddit stated that the Reddit data aggregation site Pushshift—whose service was used by LLMs—violated its API rules; the company also said it would restrict access to adult content.