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Reddit is publicly extending an olive branch to the moderator community that it largely enraged over recent weeks. In a post on Wednesday, a Reddit employee detailed outreach efforts from the company, including new weekly feedback sessions, that it hopes can help repair ties with the social media platform and over 50,000 volunteer mods that it relies on. But as you might expect, mods remain skeptical.

Extending an olive branch

A Reddit admin going by Go_JasonWaterfalls on the site and claiming the title of Reddit VP of community (Ars attempted to confirm the identity of /u/Go_JasonWaterfalls, but Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt declined to confirm the employee's identity by name) acknowledged the shattered relationship between mods—who spend thousands of hours providing free labor and have recently engaged in variously disruptive forms of protest over API pricing on the site—and Reddit—which has responded to said protests by ousting some protesting moderators from their posts. The company has also offered contentious interviews with CEO Steve Huffman. Reddit also reportedly forced some subreddits that moderators labeled "not safe for work" as a form of protest (claiming to have taken member polls beforehand) to revert back to "safe for work" and threatened to forcibly reopen subreddits that had gone private in protest.

"So, we’ve all had a... time on Reddit lately," Go_JasonWaterfalls wrote. "And I’m here to recognize it, acknowledge that our relationship has been tested, and begin the 'now what?' conversation."

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On Thursday, OpenAI announced that all paying API customers now have access to the GPT-4 API. It also introduced updates to chat-based models, announced a shift from the Completions API to the Chat Completions API, and outlined plans for deprecation of older models.

Generally considered its most powerful API product, the GPT-4 API first launched in March but has been under closed testing until now. As an API, developers can use a special interface to integrate OpenAI's large language model (LLM) into their own products for uses such as summarization, coding assistance, analysis, and composition. The model runs remotely on OpenAI's servers and provides output to other apps over the Internet.

OpenAI says the GPT-4 API with 8K context is accessible to existing developers who have a successful payment history, with plans to open access to new developers by the end of July. And in a move to distance itself from older GPT-3-style models, OpenAI has also opted to begin retiring "Completions API" models in favor of newer Chat Completions API models. Since its March launch , OpenAI says that its Chat Completions API models now account for 97 percent of OpenAI's API GPT usage.

Enlarge / There could soon be much more of this on Reddit. (credit: Getty )

The Reddit community is still reckoning with the consequences of the platform's API price hike. The changes have led to the shuttering of numerous third-party Reddit apps and have pushed several important communities, like the Ask Me Anything ( AMAs ) organizers, to reduce or end their presence on the site.

The latest group to announce its departure is BotDefense. BotDefense, which helps removes rogue submission and comment bots from Reddit and which is maintained by volunteer moderators, is said to help moderate 3,650 subreddits. BotDefense's creator told Ars Technica that the team is now quitting over Reddit's "antagonistic actions" toward moderators and developers, with concerning implications for spam moderation on some large subreddits like r/space.

Valued bot fighter

BotDefense started in 2019 as a volunteer project and has been run by volunteer mods, known as "dequeued" and "andabrownn" on Reddit. Since then, it claims to have populated its ban list with 144,926 accounts, and it helps moderates subreddits with huge followings, like r/gaming (37.4 million members), /r/aww (34.2 million), r/music (32.4 million), r/Jokes (26.2 million), r/space (23.5 million), and /r/LifeProTips (22.2 million). Dequeued told Ars that other large subreddits BotDefense helps moderates include /r/food, /r/EarthPorn, /r/DIY, and /r/mildlyinteresting.

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Ask Me Anything (AMA) has been a Reddit staple that helped popularize the social media platform. It delivered some unique, personal, and, at times, fiery interviews between public figures and people who submitted questions. The Q&A format became so popular that many people host so-called AMAs these days, but the main subreddit has been r/IAmA, where the likes of then-US President Barack Obama and Bill Gates have sat in the virtual hot seat. But that subreddit, which has been called its own "juggernaut of a media brand," is about to look a lot different and likely less reputable.

On July 1, Reddit moved forward with changes to its API pricing that has infuriated a large and influential portion of its user base. High pricing and a 30-day adjustment period resulted in many third-party Reddit apps closing and others moving to paid-for models that developers are unsure are sustainable.

The latest casualty in the Reddit battle has a profound impact on one of the most famous forms of Reddit content and signals a potential trend in Reddit content changing for the worse.

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It's been a contentious journey, but Reddit's new API pricing will take effect on July 1. What started as a fight over creating an affordable option for valued third-party Reddit apps has evolved into a bitter battle pitting Reddit against indignant developers, mods, and users. Protests remain, but some users are now preparing to exit the platform, including some of Reddit's most seasoned moderators.

Where does that leave third-party developers, some of which said they would have to pay Reddit $20 million annually to continue? Ars Technica spoke with developers to learn where their apps stand, how some will manage to stay afloat, and what Reddit's changes mean for the future.

Surviving apps

When Reddit announced that, starting on July 1, it would no longer permit free API access except for certain non-commercial apps, many Reddit app developers responded by telling users that they were unsure if they could keep the apps running. Now that the new API pricing ($12,000 per 50 million API requests) is set to be reality, here's a look at the most popular apps that will still be available.

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Ongoing protests regarding Reddit's upcoming API price change on July 1 are rattling the Reddit community, but they're not the only ones impacted. Those who navigate Google's ad-littered, search-engine-optimized (SEO) results by adding "Reddit" to their query have seen their experience hampered, too. According to CNBC , Google's aware that its search results need fine-tuning through appendages like "site:reddit.com." However, Google's response to this problem fails to address the core reasons people modify their search queries like this: There's demand for results delivering human (not necessarily influencer) voices and that aren't listed due to people manipulating Google's algorithm.

People rely on the Reddit hack for Google search results to avoid things that often float to the top of results pages—websites built on SEO but lack reliable or relevant content. But since the Reddit blackout started June 12 and was followed by other forms of user protest, that trick is less effective. As of this writing, over 2,400 subreddits are still private in protest, according to the Reddark_247 counter on Twitch, while others are read-only, suddenly labeled as not safe for work (NSFW), or dedicated to images of John Oliver .

On Monday, CNBC, citing an audio recording of a company-wide meeting from earlier this month, reported that Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google SVP who heads Google Search, "admitted users are unhappy when employees asked about the Reddit blackouts and their impact on results."

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Over 8,400 subreddits went dark from June 12 through June 14 in protest over new API pricing that is about to shutter many third-party Reddit apps. But now that the biggest uprising in Reddit history is slowing, what's next for Reddit?

Despite weeks of heated debate, Reddit still plans to begin its API pricing system on July 1. The social media company has until now provided free API access, but—after claiming it didn't want AI chatbots to profit off Reddit's content for free—it announced pricing changes so dramatic that popular third-party Reddit app Apollo faced a $20 million annual bill . Apollo now plans to close ahead of the API changes; so do other third-party apps .

With the blackout over on many subreddits, Reddit is banking on the outrage passing. But Reddit—once a thriving, distinct community—has depleted significant communal goodwill in this battle. Volunteer moderators remain apprehensive of a future without third-party apps, and thousands of subreddits still aren't public again. Reddit will try to grow revenue off a community whose most dedicated members remain anxious.

Enlarge / An AI-generated chatbot flying like a superhero. (credit: Stable Diffusion / OpenAI)

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced a sizable update to its large language model API offerings (including GPT-4 and gpt-3.5-turbo ), including a new function calling capability, significant cost reductions, and a 16,000 token context window option for the gpt-3.5-turbo model.

In large language models (LLMs), the "context window" is like a short-term memory that stores the contents of the prompt input or, in the case of a chatbot, the entire contents of the ongoing conversation. In language models, increasing context size has become a technological race, with Anthropic recently announcing a 75,000-token context window option for its Claude language model. In addition, OpenAI has developed a 32,000-token version of GPT-4, but it is not yet publicly available.

Along those lines, OpenAI just introduced a new 16,000 context window version of gpt-3.5-turbo, called, unsurprisingly, "gpt-3.5-turbo-16k," which allows a prompt to be up to 16,000 tokens in length. With four times the context length of the standard 4,000 version, gpt-3.5-turbo-16k can process around 20 pages of text in a single request. This is a considerable boost for developers requiring the model to process and generate responses for larger chunks of text.

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There are nearly 8,500 subreddits that are private or read-only right now in protest over Reddit's upcoming API price hike. The protest started on June 12, crashed Reddit for three hours , and is scheduled to continue until June 14. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, according to an internal memo reportedly viewed by The Verge today, isn't too worried, though, since it hasn't hurt Reddit's pockets yet.

According to The Verge (where you can view the full memo), Huffman sent the note to employees on Monday afternoon. It starts by noting the "challenge" from the Reddit API pricing protest .

"We do anticipate many of [the subreddits] will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless, and we have our work cut out for us," the note reportedly says. "A number of Snoos [Reddit's nickname for employees] have been working around the clock, adapting to infrastructure strains, engaging with communities, and responding to the myriad of issues related to this blackout."