Endless Thread - 'Going Dark': Reddit's API Changes

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

Reddit is restricting the use of third-party apps. More than 8,000 subreddit communities shut down in protest — including r/Blind, which says the change will drastically reduce accessibility. In this special episode, co-host Ben Brock Johnson speaks with two moderators of r/Blind about their concerns. Credits: This episode was produced by Ben Brock Johnson and Dean Russell. Mixing and sound design by Matt Reed. Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson are the co-hosts. (Image credit: Getty/Johner Images)

Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

WBUR Podcasts, Boston. I keep thinking about Android, but like I'm in the ecosystem. I have my Apple Watch. All of my stuff is HomeKit. I've got the Siri speakers. I have the Pixel Watch and Google Textis Speech on it is so laggy that it's unusable. I actually had to ADB side load. Eastby gone to it.

Amory, have you ever had to 8B? ADB side load, e-speak onto a pixel? I was just doing that before we started this. So, you know, I don't really know what it means, but I know it is a kind of technical workaround. So last week I talked to a couple of guys who do complicated techie workarounds all the time. I am Sam Pruh.

FastFinge. My name is Noah Carver. U.N.T. Carver Zero. Sam and Noah, Amory, grew up adapting technology to suit their lives. They've had to. Because unfortunately, most technology is not built with their needs in mind. Because they are blind. So Amory, Noah reached out to Endless Threat a little while back.

I think you may have seen his email. Because of this one change coming to the front page of the internet. We have heard from a lot of our listeners about this, I should say. And Reddit, I should also say, can be experienced a few different ways. One way is by using its app and website. But another very popular way to read Reddit is by using a so-called third-party app. So this is another app that ingests the information from Reddit and then makes it more accessible or presents it in a different way.

Yeah, it sort of like plugs in to Reddit's API, which is a sort of like way for software to talk to other software. And it, you know, ingests all of this stuff and then like resurfaces it for users in different ways. So like, for instance, there's like, there's an app, Amory, that will almost make Reddit more like Instagram. It'll just show you images and videos from Reddit, for instance. Okay.

Another good example of this is the iOS app Apollo, one of the most popular third-party Reddit apps. It was developed back in 2017 as a way of making Reddit easier to read, more streamlined and without ads. And Apollo connects to Reddit using this API, as we've been talking about, application programming interface. Reddit's API was free,

meaning developers could build third-party apps without paying anything. but as I think you've been hearing about, and I have been hearing about, both from our listeners and from many others, and in the news back in April, Reddit announced that it was changing that policy. If apps like Apollo wanted to continue on, Emory,

they were going to have to pay Reddit a fee, a big fee. So Amory Noah, one of the two people I spoke with, saw this Reddit news not long after it was announced. I woke up and did my morning doom scrolling on Reddit one morning. And the first thing I saw was the post from Apollo for Reddit.

And it basically said, I'm going to have to shut down because Reddit is charging me $20 million because of the API. And I knew instantly that this wasn't just about Apollo. this was about every single program that used the Reddit API, and I knew right then that that would be the end of my Reddit reading. Noah Carver and Sam Pru are moderators of R-slash Blind Amory, a subreddit specifically for the blind community. They rely on third-party apps to make Reddit more accessible, apps that, for instance, read the text of Reddit aloud,

or that audibly announce buttons like Uppelin, vote and also tools for moderators. The change in API requirements suggested to Noah and Sam that they might lose access to Reddit, or at least it was about to become a lot harder to moderate the subreddit, for instance. And that did not sit well with R slash blind. I talked with Noah and Sam about this, but we also spoke more broadly to get a sense of how they experience the internet. Here's some of that conversation. I just want to ask you both about your each of your experiences with, I guess, blindness would be the right term? Yeah.

Um, would you mind describing that to me? Sure. Um, I was born completely blind. Um, in, uh, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in 1887. So let's give you an idea of my age range. Sure. Um, and I was, um, and I was had the very unique experience that my father is also completely blind.

Okay. And he was born completely. completely blind. And he worked for over 30 years for IBM. And so I do not remember a time when there wasn't a computer talking at me. And that's very unusual, if you think about like screen readers in 1990, right? Most people didn't have access to that sort of thing. And so it's given me kind of an interesting and unique vantage point as somebody who's

sort of been at least vaguely aware of the accessibility industry for so long and sort of of seeing some of the repeated cycles and how things are changing and and the patterns in in the industry. It's been really interesting. I was also born totally blind. In 2003, I grew up in a very rural area of Maine. I spent a lot of time working with my father on a lobster boat. He's a lobster fisherman. And I also was introduced to technology at a very young age by my parents. They believed that technology and competency and exposure to it is one of many keys to success for anyone, but especially for a blind person. And I've been very fortunate. What has your experience been using Reddit as a blind person? And I imagine it is evolved over time,

just as Reddit has. Reddit started off as a very text-based medium, yes. But it still has very text-based communities like Ask Reddit, like Ask Me Anything. And so, So in a very real way, some social media feels like a system for delivering images and video that also happens to support text. Whereas Reddit even still feels like a system for delivering text that also supports images and videos, which is a subtle but important difference, I think. Can you just talk about functionality from your perspective? Like, what is that like as someone who's very ignorant of what your experience? is of the internet generally and Reddit specifically. How are you consuming it?

What does it sound like? Can you play it for me from your phone? Help me understand what that experience is like. So a screen reader is an audio medium. And so it's taking whatever's on the screen and reading it out. And so the first thing to note about screen reader voices is people who are blind or visually impaired generally prefer very robotic, very predictable screen reader voices. AKA not people in my line of business usually.

Right, right. But the reason being, because I have my voice set to something like 800 words per minute. So I'm going to press the hot Pee that lets me jump from heading to heading. Did you understand that? Yes. Both of us did. That is wild. That is built up. That strategy of being able to listen to speech like that is built up over years of hearing it. And then you wake up one morning, fire up your computer to check your email.

And you're like, wow, this voice is really slow for me now. And I have the impulse to crank this up by a lot. And people, it's funny because people will say, oh, what, so you could listen to like a podcast at 8. 18X? Well, no, because it entirely depends on the very predictable characteristics of the voice. So when I sort of slow this down, it'll become obvious that like this is not a human voice. I'm going to go ahead and take it down. Rite 75. Rate 6.

Rate 3.3.Rate. Rate 20. And so now we'll keep skipping through headlines. Clickable recite 90% of a movie and get 100K. What are you watching? Heading level 3 link. Clickable, I ask GPT how to hide a body heading level 3. link. You got some GPT in there. You love it.

How to hide a body. So, but now I want to, I want to demonstrate something where I'm, let's say that I'm interested in this post and I would like to upvote it. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to try and find the Fote button. I know that the Fote button is generally above the post because I'm an experienced Reddit user. So I'm going to cursor up. Link graphic I ask GP toggle button not press downvote. Downvote, nope.

3.7K. That's the number of. votes. And so all of these buttons are are labeled. Unfortunately, when you get into moderation, none of the buttons are labeled in that way. Why? Because Reddit hasn't labeled them. It's really that simple. It's like they have, Reddit has not taken the extra step to add alt text. Yep. To the moderator. tools for subreddits. They've done it everywhere else. They have not done it. There are some organizations that prioritize accessibility. And there are some organizations that kind of treat it as an

afterthought. Reddit seems to have been the latter type of organization where accessibility was sort of something that they kind of went, okay, it sort of works now. And in any case, we've got these third-party apps so it's not a big deal. Right? Right. And then the API changes came along. What happened after the API announcement in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.

And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader.

Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Reddit's decision to charge third-party apps for API access threatened to upend the way blind Redditors use the platform. It looked like apps that read text aloud and helped users navigate the posts would no longer be usable.

In other words, Sam and Noah worried that Reddit was about to go dark for them. Can y'all talk a little bit about what is it like as a blind person to scroll Reddit and start to realize that a bunch of subreddits are going to go dark? Like, can you just sort of talk more about how this kind of played out for you, Noah, as you were consuming the internets? Well, I mean, with that, I thought, great, there goes another online community. Because we'd been through this before with Twitter. Twitter had done something just like this a couple months ago in the new reign of Elon Musk in his great cost-saving. Genius, I think it's called genius. Yeah.

Yeah, he fired the entire accessibility team. And then he priced all API users basically out of Twitter. And by the way, according to the developer of Apollo, Reddit was not going to pull a Twitter. Their API pricing was going to be fair and equitable, and it would be something that everybody could live with, and it would be fine. and then they announced how much it would cost. And by the way, the $20 million, admittedly, Apollo is probably the most used API using a third-party app out there. And so the price is insanely high. But it's insanely high.

It was insanely high for everyone else. I believe the developer of Red Reader, who the Red Reader is the client that I use on my Android device, I think he was going to have to pay a million dollars a year. After the news, the moderators for R-slash-Blind decided to shut down the subreddit in protest, and they weren't alone. More than 8,000 Reddit communities also temporarily shut down. That got Reddit's attention, and the company started reaching out to some of the subreddits, including R-slash-Blind. After a lot of raising our voices and saying, wait a minute, this is going to be really bad, for the blind community, and as that started becoming one of the things that was talked about in the context of protesting and in the context of the media, Reddit then said, okay, accessibility apps are exempt from these pricing requirements.

and Reddit expects that apart from donations, these developers should develop these apps on a non-commercial basis. And it's very frustrating to feel that accessibility as seen as something that someone should work on out of a labor of love, rather than as something that is valid and something that someone should get paid for. You guys are a pretty small sub, like, you know, 20,000 subscribers, I think last I checked or somewhere thereabouts,

where you reached out to pretty late in the game, or did one of your moderators, like, get reached out to for another sub and flag this? Or like, can you give me at least maybe some of the TikTok of this, if that makes sense? We were actually reached out to surprisingly early in the game. And what I will say is that I think that it is still one of the few Silicon Valley big tech companies that will engage in dialogue when there is protest. Right. all of the people internally at Reddit

whom we have spoke to about accessibility do care deeply but do they necessarily have the seniority and the power and the ability to change Reddit's course given its various other goals in and around profit, in and around the IPO, in and around preventing AI companies

from using Reddit's data for training without sort of paying for it and all of these other concerns that Reddit has, again, I don't know. Our slash blind remained shut down in protest for 48 hours. By the end of that, it became clear that Reddit was at least considering amending its new API rules to keep the site accessible, but a lot is still up in the air. After the 48-hour protest, R-blind, we did reopen the subreddit.

I will say that we're keeping on top of that to make sure that if we need to go, we will have a new home ready to go that is accessible and that meets our, not only that is accessible and that meets our needs, but that gives us a seat at a table in the same way that Reddit gave us a seat at a table, right? So that we can continue to participate and engage in community with other people, not just our fellow blind people, as critical as community with blind people is. What would you say to somebody who says, like, look, sorry, there is maybe 20,000 of you, and this site is massive and it needs to go public and it wants everybody to use its own app.

And don't worry, you're on the list for fixes. We'll get there eventually. Just trust us as we, you know, do this thing that we have to do to stay, you know, to bring in revenue. and stay relevant. And sorry, this is just kind of the way things go when you're dealing with a behemoth like Reddit. Accessibility and customizable are not just better for people who are blind

or people who are visually impaired or people who are experiencing disability. Those things are better for everyone. And I think that has never been more clearly demonstrated than by the support we have received from every single other subreddit involved in the protest. Can you talk about how that has manifested, like, that support? You know, as blind people, we have, I think both Sam and I can say we've had the experience

where we've just been kind of brushed off. You know, we shoulder it and move on. But it can be frustrating and tiring. and it's really quite heartwarming and lovely to see that this big huge place is saying loud and proud that your voice is important for this community. Have any other subreddits really felt like sister or? other subreddits in this experience? I mean, transcribers of Reddit, obviously.

Yeah. It's probably the biggest volunteer alt text initiative on the internet that describes the content and the text in images and videos that we cannot access independently as blind people. Can you talk about like just are blind and like when all of this stuff isn't going on? Like what that community is like? Oh boy. I mean, there's everything, right? It's everything from, you know, what are the workarounds that I can use to have fun with this latest mainstream game on PlayStation to, you know, one of my favorite.

questions that got a lot of engagement. This was a number of years ago. I don't know if I can track it down now, but was from a blind cat owner who was saying, you know, my cat keeps getting sick and throwing up. And I never know where she's thrown up. How do other blind cat owners deal with this? Right. How do you find the cat puke?

Yeah. Like, or how do I get a job? I'm going into this field. What is your recommendation for how I can best, you know, market myself and get employed? or, you know, I'm going totally blind or I'm losing some of my vision and I don't know what to do or how to deal with this or what I should be doing or what my next steps are and I don't have a community and what do I do now. Yeah, and also I'm scared. Yeah, that too. you think about yourself going blind,

you might not think that you would be able to have a happy, productive, worthwhile life. Yeah. And there is such value in people who are being diagnosed with oncoming blindness to see that like there are struggles, but like we're, we're okay.

And like you'll be okay too. Yeah. You know, as a seeing person, so obviously like a very ignorant sort of point of view, right? Thinking about blindness and the idea of quote unquote going dark I just wondered if that struck you at all, Sam as this was playing out.

So to me, going dark is really a turn of phrase. Because I have been blind all of my life, people say, oh, well, what do you see? Is it just black? Well, no, it's nothing. Right. You don't. It's hard to know black when you haven't seen the other stuff or yeah. Exactly, right? But I think there are people.

There are many people who have come to our community with diagnosis of sight loss and who came to our community when they were still able to see and are now completely blind and continue with us today. And I think their experience of that is quite possibly more poignant than my own. Right? To me, it's a turn of phrase that I grew up with and that everybody around me used. And so I also use my life. I don't consider my life to be dark now. Sure. Because my life continues on the way it has always been, right?

Absolutely. So I also share the experience of being born completely blind. And so, and I was sort of giggling in the background when he was talking about interacting with people and they're being like, well, do you see, do you see black or do you see white? What do you see? And I'm like, uh, I don't see anything, man. see nothing. I have had that experience happen to be so many times. It is almost as common as the endless numbers of trolls who insist on coming into our blind

and wanting to know how we all wipe ourselves. Oh, boy. It's like the most popular stupid question that we get. That's ridiculous because nobody's looking when they're wiping themselves. What are the ridiculous? Thank you. A lot of better questions to ask. Come on, get creative, guys.

Put a little more thought into it. Step up your game. I guess the last question which I warned you about Noah is just like you're a vocal performer. And I did say to you, are there any songs that you feel like typify this experience? And would you be willing to sing me a couple of phrases from an opera or something? You know, the song that I think of is, and I'm not sure that I'm getting the words right on this, but we'll meet again, don't know when, don't know how. You know, that song sort of, that song sort of, sort of rings a bell. And unfortunately, I don't know any more of it. Oh, that was beautiful.

Don't know where Don't know where Noah and Sam, thank you so much for spending all this time with me and talking to me. Thanks for having us. Thank you. So, Amory, I want to tell you about sort of like a follow-up text that I got from Noah just earlier this week

after there was more conversation between the moderators of R-slash-blind and Reddit administrators. The community, the R-slash blind community, and the moderators came away with really serious concerns, which Noah says Reddit was either unable or unwilling to address during the meeting. So, you know, Reddit is currently prioritizing accessibility for users rather than moderators. Okay. Reddit representatives, Noah says,

didn't seem aware that blind moderators rely on third-party applications you know, because Reddit's moderation tools present significant accessibility challenges. That's the part that's kind of shocking to me because we think all the time about, you know, public spaces needing to make public physical spaces accessible and here is a public online space that is not accessible and should be.

You know, and really from the moderator's perspective, like our slash blind will basically just effectively go dark because if moderators literally cannot do the moderation work that makes the sub work, it will just be like, you know, it'll be like an abandoned house, you know, there will be no way for the subreddit to be moderated, and that's a big problem. Noah also said that, you know, Reddit's representatives refuse to answer questions about formal certifications and accreditations for qualifications of employees tasked with ensuring universal accessibility.

So basically saying that, you know, the people at Reddit that are working on this maybe are not from the community, maybe do not, you know, really have a lot of experience in dealing with accessibility issues. And that's, you know, another concern. Reddit also kind of refused to define this term,

according to NOAA, accessibility focused app. So like supposedly accessibility focused apps you know, are what Reddit is trying to allow through the gate with these API changes, trying to sort of support R-slash-Blind and other communities that need these accessibility apps. But Reddit just didn't show, according to NOAA,

evidence that Reddit understands, that the administrators understand, like, what that actually means. And I think that's a problem. Reddit administrators also refuse to sort of say, make commitments as to, you know, when accessibility improvements would be rolled out to the website or apps.

You know, and it looks like July 1st is going to make Reddit and these moderation tools it's just not going to be ready for disabled users and especially moderators. I'll be really interested to see what happens here because this kind of inaccessibility on a platform like Reddit as big and powerful as Reddit just should not be allowed.

So I hope that the members of R-slash-Blind make some headway with Reddit administrators on this. Before we go, we should mention that, yes, July 1st is still the cutoff date for all of this to start really happening in earnest. And that the transcription subreddit that Sam and Noah mentioned is now fully offline, because the moderators just don't feel that they can continue to moderate the subreddit in light of the sort of lack of changes and understanding about accessibility

that's been displayed by the admins according to the moderators. So I guess that's all. We'll keep following this story. Endless Threat is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Ben Brock Johnson, with help from Dean Russell and some co-hosting from... Amory Sievertson. Mix and sound design by Matt Reed.

And the rest of our team is Emily Jankowski, Sumitajoshi, Grace Tatter, Paul Vicus, and Quincy Walters.