No more NSFW? Reddit blocks access to porn, obscenity via third-party apps

Reddit has blocked access to mature content on the platform via third-party apps. The company’s CEO Steve Huffman announced last month that access to mature content via third-party apps would no longer work as of July 5. Users will now have to log in to the official Reddit app to view explicit content.

In a Reddit post last month, CEO Steve Huffman had announced, “Effective July 5, 2023, we will limit access to mature content via our Data API as part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails to how explicit content and communities on Reddit are discovered and viewed,”.Huffman had further noted that the change in Data API will not impact any moderator bots or extensions. 

A report by Vice noted that Reddit’s move is aimed at forcing users to adopt the official Reddit app instead of third-party apps. The report noted that third-party apps don’t just include porn, but also other types of explicit content, including sex education, conversations about sexuality and harm reduction.

Reddit announced in April that it planned to allow third parties access to its application programming interface, or API, data. In an interview with the New York Times, Huffman had argued that popular chatbots on the market such as Google’s Bard, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat were trained using Reddit’s API data.

In the post written last month, Huffman reiterated the need for API fees, saying “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.”

Redditors have been in arms about the company’s decision to charge exorbitantly for API data which is used by third-party apps to provide features that are not available on the official app and have been used by moderators for managing their communities. 

Many subreddits even went to the extent of organizing a 48-hour-long protest against the new API changes. Some of these communities started posting pornographic content or taking their subreddits as NSFW as a form of protest against the changes brought in by Reddit. NSFW subreddits cannot be advertised and further age-related restrictions are placed on entering the subreddit.

 

Catch all the Technology News and Updates on Live Mint.
Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates & Live Business News.

More
Less

Updated: 07 Jul 2023, 12:02 PM IST

For all the latest Technology News Click Here 

 For the latest news and updates, follow us on Google News

Read original article here

Denial of responsibility! TheDailyCheck is an automatic aggregator around the global media. All the content are available free on Internet. We have just arranged it in one platform for educational purpose only. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, all materials to their authors. If you are the owner of the content and do not want us to publish your materials on our website, please contact us by email – [email protected] The content will be deleted within 24 hours.