I have a theory that the advancement of AI as demonstrated by the likes of chatGPT is gradually assimilating the data corpuses of big social media companies and using it to train bigger and better models. The social media sites are being eaten alive.

So it is only natural that Reddit would want to ban API access or make it incredibly expensive. This defense prevents outsiders from extracting their valuable data.

But there is a bigger issue that makes this problem existential not only for the likes of twitter and reddit etc. Eventually, there will be no clear distinction between a human user and an AI agent, it is already possible to instruct an agent to browse the internet and carry out actions on behalf of a user. If this process is scaled up then it becomes a de facto programmable interface to the application.

When this happens the remaining users will be forced to pay for continued access because they will have no way to verify that they are human and no way to prove that the text they are reading is not going to be used to train large language models. The business model that fueled Reddit for so many years (unpaid content creators and moderators) will fade away and the site will autocannibalise.