Reddit Cuts Off Pushshift and Third-Party Archives in 2023 API Crackdown

On April 18, 2023, ahead of its planned initial public offering, Reddit announced it would begin charging for its previously free API, with CEO Steve Huffman framing the decision around the value of Reddit's data to AI companies: 'The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable, but we don't need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.' As part of the same crackdown, Reddit revoked the bulk-data access used by Pushshift, the long-running project that since 2015 had ingested nearly every public Reddit post and comment in near real-time.

Reddit said Pushshift had violated its API terms. Access was not restored on the old terms; instead, Pushshift access was later reinstated only for verified, approved moderators, limited to moderation use cases and requiring explicit Reddit approval through a formal request process documented in Reddit's official Help center. The open, bulk-archival function that had defined Pushshift for years was effectively ended.

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. Those tools were essentially front-ends for Pushshift's archived data, so when Pushshift's feed was cut, they broke simultaneously. In their wake, such tools could surface only content that had been archived before the mid-2023 cutoff, leaving everything after it invisible to them.

The academic cost was substantial. The Pushshift Reddit dataset, formally described by Baumgartner and colleagues in an ICWSM 2020 paper, had become one of the most heavily used corpora in computational social science, underpinning a large body of peer-reviewed research on online communities, moderation, and discourse. Cutting off bulk access removed a standard, widely cited dataset from researchers who had built methods and longitudinal studies around its continued availability.

The change carried a double-edged effect on data control and privacy. On one hand, it gave Reddit and its users more practical ability to make deleted content actually disappear, since third-party mirrors could no longer easily resurrect it — a genuine privacy benefit for someone who deletes a regretted post. On the other, it removed an independent check on platform and moderator removals, eliminating a tool that researchers, journalists, and ordinary users had relied on to document what Reddit and its moderators chose to take down. The same cutoff that protected a user's right to be forgotten also weakened the public's ability to audit content moderation.

The API repricing and Pushshift cutoff were also among the proximate triggers of the June 2023 site-wide protests, in which thousands of subreddits went private or restricted. Huffman said the API would remain free for moderation-tool developers and academic researchers, but the loss of Pushshift's timeframe-queryable historical data hit precisely those groups hardest, and Reddit did not reverse course despite the scale of the backlash. The episode marked a decisive consolidation of control over Reddit's retained and deleted content into Reddit's own hands.