On Monday, a sizable number of subreddits, some of which are the most-subscribed communities on Reddit, set themselves to private and essentially “went dark” in protest of the network’s upcoming changes to their application programming interface (API) pricing structure.
As such, those subreddits are not publically accessible, even to those who are already subscribed to them.
As of the time of this writing, over 8,400 subreddits had gone dark, according to a Twitch stream tracking them.
The coordinated protest has been in the works since last week when moderators learned that some of Reddit’s most well-regarded third-party apps said they wouldn’t be able to afford the site’s updated API pricing. Some developers, including those who run Apollo for Reddit, announced they would be shutting down their apps rather than pay the new API prices. According to them, the new prices would mean charges in excess of $20 million a year.
Apollo will close down on June 30th. Reddit’s recent decisions and actions have unfortunately made it impossible for Apollo to continue. Thank you so, so much for all the support over the years. ❤️ https://t.co/HOJaLMW8fx
— Christian Selig (@ChristianSelig) June 8, 2023
“Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use,” said Reddit’s chief executive Steve Huffman on Friday in an “Ask Me Anything” discussion. “We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive.”
For most subreddits, the protest is expected to last until June 14, but some have vowed to stay private until Reddit reverts its decision.
Many subreddits participating in the protest are going private for 48 hours, from June 12th to June 14th, but some plan to stay private until things change, according to a pinned post in the subreddit r/Save3rdPartyApps.
Among the subreddits that have gone dark, there are several sports-related ones. The most prominent of which is r/sports, which has over 20 million subscribers, but the list also includes r/NFL, r/CollegeBasketball, r/NBA, r/Soccer, r/Baseball, r/MMA, r/Formula1, and r/Hockey, all of which boast millions of subscribers as well and drive a lot of daily traffic to the site.
As for why subreddits are able to do this on Reddit’s site, Platformer’s Casey Newton explains how Reddit’s years spent putting users in charge of content creation, moderation, and product development is coming back to bite them as they attempt to increase revenue.
“Allowing them to (mostly) self-govern has exempted Reddit from many of the impossible decisions faced by the social-media CEOs who took a more top-down approach to moderation,” wrote Newton. “And while we may look back on it as a zero-interest rate phenomenon, Reddit’s free API accelerated the development of its app ecosystem, allowing users to create complementary tools and experiences that increased the service’s overall value.
It’s little wonder that, having long granted users so much power, Reddit now finds itself in crisis over a clumsy move to wrest it back. Let this be a lesson to anyone else who ever builds a social network: tell your users that the community belongs to them for long enough, and at some point they’ll start to believe you.”
