A huge part of Reddit is currently unreachable. A protest involving most of the platform.
Reddit is a huge social networking platform known practically all over the world. It is used by fans of many games, series, or sports, among others. Virtually anyone can create their own page, and the largest ones enjoy millions of followers. As of June 12, however, quite a few of them were shut down – why?
Reddit announced that it plans to change the policy it has towards APIs for third-party programs, which did not necessarily please the site’s users. Many of them did not hide their displeasure, and a sizable number of subreddits announced that they would suspend their work for a specific period of time in protest.
Reddit users protest
Using the Reddit Blackout Tracker tool, it can be seen that the vast majority of large subreddits on the site are now offline. The blackout includes gaming subreddits (37 million subscribers) and even niche gaming subreddits such as r/NatureisMetal, which make 2.42 million subscribers participating in the protest.
As of this moment, the site reports that more than 2 billion users who subscribe to their favorite subreddits cannot access the forums, and will not be able to do so until the moderation and admin teams behind the communities decide to unblock them again. However, it is important to remember that this 2 billion figure is not the number of unique users and is repeated between communities with shared subscribers.
The announced change is a really big one – Reddit has announced that as of May 31, the platform has begun charging for the use of its API, which allows unofficial apps and other programs to access the site.
The popular Apollo app used to browse Reddit will have to incur a cost of 20 million a year to continue operating. The proposed change will also affect any browser add-ons and bots, with the result that they will most likely simply be shut down.
The blackout was initially expected to last 48 hours, but some communities have announced that they are shutting down indefinitely. The decisions were made especially after Reddit’s CEO confirmed that the company would not back down from the proposed changes, despite realizing that many users would turn away from the platform.
Some subreddits rely heavily on bots to help filter spam and the like, which will now be much more difficult, as it costs a considerable amount of money to run bots on the scale that it used to.