If you’re a Reddit user, you’ve certainly noticed a remarkable change in this social network: thousands of subreddits have become inaccessible to millions of users and have gone from public to private. The reason, of course, is money.

What happened. In April, Reddit administrators announced that they would soon begin charging for access to their APIs and, by extension, the massive amounts of data that millions of users have enriched the platform with over the years. The measure followed Twitter’s footsteps and aimed to monetize the use of a hitherto free API.

Apollo case. The first to be affected by the change were third-party clients developed for browsing Reddit from mobile phones. The best known is that of Apollo, an app that Reddit so far said goodbye for not being able to afford the amounts it wanted to keep working. “I don’t have that much money,” explained the developer for this client. Other customers, such as ReddPlanet or Sync, have also announced plans to shut down their apps.

Revolution on Reddit. The policy change sparked a rare riot on Reddit, and a few days ago the moderators of some major subreddit announced a “temporary blackout” that will remain hidden for two days. Things have accelerated since then and there are currently thousands of subdirectories in a blackout state that can be temporary or obscure. On r/iPhone, for example, they expected a 48-hour outage, but Reddit CEO Steve Huffman’s remarks caused them to change their minds—that message is no longer accessible outside of approved members of the channel—and impose an indefinite blackout.

This subdirectory is private. That’s the message that appears in huge subreddits like r/funny, which has over 40 million followers, as well as on equally popular subreddits like r/gaming, r/Music, r/science, r/food, r/ with millions of users. videos, r/history or /InternetIsBeautiful. The website Reddark has been monitoring these “protests” and recorded how 6,292 subreddits are currently experiencing an outage at the time of writing this news.

Steve Huffman, hated. According to The Verge, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman couldn’t calm things down, and his recent participation in a Q&A session (the famous AMA meeting, “Ask Me Anything”) was a disaster. and it served to accuse (among other things) Huffman of being a coward. One of the top-rated comments reflected the emotions of many users. Thus, he stressed that you “ask for ridiculous amounts of money” and how not to share all that income with Reddit moderators, for example, who “depend a significant amount of time and effort on maintaining their community.”

lack of transparency. Both client developers and moderators have complained about the lack of transparency by those in charge of Reddit. The announcement did not include any information about API pricing, and also avoided giving details such as banning these third-party customers from viewing adult content. The r/AskHistorians moderators have warned of their reasons for joining the proposal, which they will be making very soon with this announcement.

mighty knight. The Reddit move was received very negatively in the community. Those responsible for r/funny stated that charging for the API is intended to “target your upcoming IPO only.” Huffman himself (“spez” on Reddit) tried to explain that they are a company and their purpose is to make a profit by responding to a user. That exit to the parquet is expected to take place in the second half of 2023. What is uncertain is whether Reddit will be the same after this scandal. Although their reasons were very different back then, they had already survived another possible defeat.

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