Reddit Cuts Off Pushshift and Third-Party Archives in 2023 API Crackdown
2023
In 2023 Reddit terminated Pushshift's bulk data access as part of its paid-API crackdown, breaking the historical archive that powered research and the tools (Reveddit, Removeddit, Unddit) used to view deleted or removed content — reshaping who controls retained Reddit data.
What happened
On April 18, 2023, Reddit announced it would begin charging for its previously free API, citing the value of its data corpus to large AI companies. As part of the crackdown, Reddit revoked the bulk-data access used by Pushshift, the long-running project that had ingested nearly every public Reddit post and comment in near real-time. Reddit said Pushshift had violated its API terms; access was later restricted to verified moderators only.
Pushshift was the backbone of Reddit research and of a class of transparency and moderation tools — including Reveddit, Removeddit, and Unddit — that let users see comments and posts that had been deleted by their authors or removed by moderators. When Pushshift's feed was cut, those tools broke simultaneously. The change has a double-edged data-control and privacy effect: it gave Reddit and users more practical ability to make deleted content disappear from third-party mirrors, while also removing an independent check on platform and moderator removals, and curtailing academic access to a heavily used dataset.
The API repricing and Pushshift cutoff also triggered the June 2023 site-wide protests, in which thousands of subreddits went private or restricted.
Impact
The historical Reddit archive used for research and for viewing deleted/removed content was severed; tools like Reveddit, Removeddit, and Unddit lost coverage. Academics and moderators lost a major dataset, while Reddit consolidated control over retained and deleted content.