Proponents of decentralized social often cite censorship resistance as one of its main advantages - as a user, you can know with full certainty that you’ll never have to worry about a company or individual censoring what you have to say or banning your account. You own your profile fully and that can never be taken from you on a protocol.

We couldn’t agree more, and it’s why we chose to bet big on Farcaster - one of the leading open social protocols. But there’s another form of censorship resistance that’s talked about much less, which is that of developers, not just users. 

Great social products are often built with thriving developer ecosystems around them. But as they mature, history has shown that companies become more and more restrictive towards what they allow to be built on their platform. It’s economically rational from their perspective - they prefer to monetize API access, and they don’t want to “leak value” to external developers. However, it ends up being a worse outcome for developers and users both.

A couple years ago, Reddit infamously increased the pricing of their API as they geared towards IPO. It became a national news story that ultimately ended in the sunsetting of many beloved third party apps built on top of the Reddit API. Here’s the story:

Reddit had originally launched a paid first-party app for iPhone and iPod called iReddit, but due to poor quality – having been built by an external agency – the app struggled to gain traction amongst Reddit’s userbase. Instead, mobile users flocked to third party apps - at the time, the two most popular ones were an indie app called Alien Blue on iOS, and rif (Reddit is fun) on Android. 

Alien Blue got a ton of usage in the early 2010s, becoming the canonical mobile app for users who wanted to browse Reddit. It got enough traction that Reddit eventually acquired the product in 2014. 

Reddit would operate Alien Blue for the next two years as its official mobile app, before eventually sunsetting it and replacing it with a new Reddit mobile. 

Shortly after Alien Blue’s sunset, an indie developer named Christian Selig released a new third-party Reddit app called Apollo. Apollo quickly gained traction as an alternative to Reddit’s app due to its robust featureset, lack of advertisements, and general polish. Apollo went on to have over 5M downloads, becoming the most used alternative Reddit client and beloved by the community. 

In 2023, Reddit announced that they were making steep changes to begin charging for their API, making it much less feasible for developers to operate third party apps, especially at scale. They only gave a few weeks of notice for these changes, leading to a ton of backlash from Reddit’s developer and user community. It became a national news story, with over 7,000 subreddits going dark in protest to the changes. Steve Huffman, then CEO, gave an infamous AMA on the platform where he doubled down on the changes.

Selig also shared that under the new model, it would cost him over $20M/year to continue operating Apollo. This was obviously unfeasible, and Reddit ultimately chose not to budge on the changes. In June, Apollo, rif, and many other clients ended up shutting down, ending the story of Reddit’s infamous developer rug. 

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This isn’t to say Reddit was morally wrong or anything for pricing out developers. It was a decision they had to make for their business, and it’s likely that it was the right one - many large companies were also scraping large amounts of Reddit data to train AI models, and Reddit would go on to IPO the following year, citing API fees and data licensing as new business lines.

That being said, it does expose the very real platform risk that developers take on when they build on top of closed platforms. A company’s goals and priorities can always change, and Reddit’s saga is not particularly unique. The story of a platform leveraging third party developers to grow its users and network effects – and then pulling up the ladder after getting big enough – is a tale as old as time. 

On Farcaster, developers can build with full assurance that they avoid this risk. At Neynar, we’re focused on servicing these developers by building the best tools for building on top of Farcaster - we power many of the top alternative clients, AI agents, and mini apps built on the protocol.