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Many of the largest communities on Reddit have closed shop today as users unite in protest against sweeping changes to squeeze profit out of the site’s user data. The campaign has seen many major subreddits join up, including heavy hitters like r/todayilearned, r/funny, r/aww, r/music, and r/gaming, all of which boast millions of subscribers.
These and more than 5000 other subreddits have now gone dark. For example, if you try to visit r/aww to get your daily dose of cute kitty pictures, you’ll see this:
The full message reads:
“/r/aww has gone private due to Reddit’s decision to effectively kill 3rd party applications with their API costs. If or when /r/aww returns will depend on Reddit’s continued responses to the situation.”
The anger arises from Reddit’s announcement that from July, the platform will begin charging third-party developers colossal fees to access its API (Application Programming Interface), which many external apps need to run. Perhaps the most high-profile victim is Apollo, an alternative to the often buggy and cumbersome mobile app.
Apollo developer Christian Selig has explained that these changes would mean he’d need to pay Reddit approximately $20 million per year to keep the app going, so must shut it down when the changes arrive.
The protest is expected to run between June 12 and 14, though many moderators have indicated these subreddits will stay private until Reddit reverses its decision and continues to keep the API free to access. The value of Reddit is intrinsically bound up in its users, with the moderators that keep the site running smoothly essentially working a hard job for no pay and little reward. So, essentially, they’re the people the Reddit execs really shouldn’t antagonize.
Whether the decision will be reversed remains to be seen, though this mass user action is going to quickly hit traffic and the bottom line, so there’ll be some tense scenes over at Reddit HQ today.
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