Reddit Witnesses Over 6,000 Communities Shut Down in Protest of API Alterations
The Reddit community has initiated a widespread demonstration against the company’s contentious API modifications. Numerous subreddits have “gone dark,” rendering their communities private and preventing non-subscribers from accessing their content. This protest has garnered thousands of participants.
Some of the site’s most popular subreddits, including r/Music, r/funny, r/aww and r/todayilearned — each with millions of followers — have joined the effort, along with thousands of other communities. The movement has grown significantly in recent days with CEO Steve Huffman’s user AMA, where he advocated for new policies that will see popular third-party apps such as RIF and Apollo shut down for good.
Last week, the number of participating subreddits was just over 3,000. But by Monday morning, the number had grown to more than 6,200 communities, according to a Twitch stream that followed the protest. Following the blackout, participating subreddits have posted short messages warning users that they oppose the company’s planned API changes. Most have committed to their 48-hour blackout, but at least 60 subreddits say they plan to protest “indefinitely” until the company reverses the changes. Many also advise users not to browse Reddit at all. Some have also set up Discord servers to encourage subscribers to stay off Reddit.
The backlash against the company’s new API policy began after Christian Selig, the developer of the Reddit client app Apollo, said that Reddit’s new pricing would cost him up to $20 million a year to keep the app running. The company further angered Apollo fans by claiming that Selig had “threatened” the company, which the developer immediately denied with a recording of a call with a Reddit employee. Huffman then doubled down on the criticism in her AMAs last week.
“As the subreddit blackout begins, I wanted to thank the Reddit community and everyone who stood by from the bottom of my heart,” Selig wrote on Twitter. “Let’s hope Reddit listens.”
Reddit users are not only upset by the company’s treatment of Selig and Apollo, but also frustrated by the loss of moderation and accessibility features that are only available through third-party apps. In a message to users, the Moderators of r/blind said that the usability of the original Reddit app was so poor that a sighted user had to change the subreddit to private.
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. We, with thousands of other subreddits, have gone dark for 48 hours. We will be back on June 14. Our Discord server remains open. Thank you for understanding; app so bad, vision required to go dark
Reddit Moderators — who are often quick to point out that they are unpaid volunteers — shared similar ones. “In many cases, these apps offer great mod tools, customizations, streamlined interfaces, and other quality-of-life enhancements that the official app doesn’t offer,” the Moderators wrote in an open letter. “The potential loss of these services due to the pricing change would significantly impact our ability to moderate effectively, which would degrade the user experience in our communities and for us as modules and users ourselves.”
So far, it’s unclear whether the protest will be able to influence Reddit’s leaders. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but has previously defended the new API policy, citing that generative AI companies leverage its data. “We’re going to keep winning until the wins come,” Huffman said last week at the AMAs.
