- More than 7,200 subreddit forums are staging a 48-hour blackout starting Monday.
- It’s all because of Reddit’s new pricing policy that charges third-party apps for using its API.
- One unnamed moderator of a popular Reddit forum told BBC these protests were about “strength in numbers.”
As of Monday, thousands of subreddit forums have started going “dark” — or private — for two days to protest Reddit’s new pricing policy.
Who’s protesting against Reddit’s new pricing policy?
As of press time, the moderators of 7,266 subreddits are expected to stage a blackout on Monday, according to a Reddit post. The blackout stands to affect over 2.6 billion Reddit subscribers and more than 28,000 moderators. The number of participating moderators and affected subreddits is rising.
The main subreddit forums for r/gaming and r/music — which have a combined membership of just under 70 million — and r/todayilearned, a fact-sharing forum with almost 32 million users, went private on Monday.
R/Music wrote in a post that it was “closed Indefinitely for Reddit API policy change protest.”
Among other major subreddit forums, r/aww and r/pics — each with over 30 million members — will also be staging a protest, the BBC reported.
Why are Reddit users protesting right now?
In a Wednesday post, the “Explain Like I’m Five” subreddit forum — where over 22 million Reddit users discuss layperson-friendly explanations — wrote that they are suspending normal operations to protest Reddit’s proposed changes about third-party apps.
They laid out their explanation in a classic “ELI5” way.
First, some context: A third-party app is another way to post to and interact with Reddit. Before Reddit launched its app in 2016, there were other apps — such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Slide, Comet, and Boost — that allowed these interactions.
According to the ELI5 post, these third-party apps scraped Reddit posts by using something called the Application Programming Interface, or API. These apps also allowed users to customize their Reddit by changing the display theme, or changing how to upvote a post.
“Have you ever gotten mad at the reddit app because it had bugs, or it was just weird about how it did something? Right now, and until July 1st, you have the option to try out one of these apps and see if you like reddit better this way. After July 1st, you won’t have the option anymore,” it said.
And it’s all because of Reddit’s new pricing policy that charges third-party apps for using its API that were announced on May 31.
API access is free for moderator tools and bots, Reddit’s spokesperson told Insider.
Another reason for the protest stems from accessibility and a change in policies regarding mature and not safe for work — or NSFW — content.
“If Reddit was a restaurant third-party apps are franchises. We can get a burger from Reddit directly or from a franchise. The official Reddit location is at the top of a cliff. Disabled people can’t get there. Reddit is charging franchise fees so high nobody else can afford to offer burgers,” wrote the moderators of r/Blind, many of whom use screen-reading tools that depend on the API.
How are Reddit users protesting?
Reddit users are protesting by making certain subreddits inaccessible to users for 48 hours. The full list of participating subreddits is here.
While r/ModCoord and /r/Save3rdPartyApps will be publicly visible, “no new threads will be posted, besides mod announcements,” u/SpicyThunder335, a moderator, wrote in a post.
Reddit relies on community moderators — many of them volunteers in unpaid positions — to keep its website functional by flagging spam-like, banned, and even illegal content.
One unnamed moderator of a popular Reddit forum told the BBC these protests were about a show of “strength in numbers.”
“If it’s almost the entire website, would they destroy what they’ve built up in all these communities, just to push through this highly unpopular change that both the mods and users of Reddit are overwhelmingly against?” the moderator told the BBC.
