Reddit’s massive ‘blackout’ protest, explained
polygon.comReddit users are revolting en masse against planned changes to the platform’s API. The social media site experienced an outage on Monday morning, as more than 7,600 subreddits — including some of the largest gaming-related subreddits — went dark in protest of changes to third-party API pricing, just days after a disastrous AMA with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. Other subreddits are simply no longer accepting new posts or edits.
This blackout is slated to run from June 12 to June 14, but some mods and communities are planning to continue protesting until “the issue is adequately addressed,” according to the website Save 3rd Party Apps. That site is also tracking the blackout status of Reddit’s 250 most-followed subreddits.
On April 18, Reddit announced it would update access to its API, which notably included the introduction of a paid model for third-party apps. It would require “premium access for third parties who require additional capabilities and higher usage limits,” according to the announcement.
Last week, developers of a number of third-party apps — including Apollo and Reddit Is Fun — said that the new API pricing would make it unaffordable for those apps to continue working on Reddit. Another popular Reddit reader app, BaconReader, would also likely be affected. A number of users have compared this change to Twitter’s recent move to charge for “premium” third-party API access.
Notably, Christian Selig, the creator of Apollo (a third-party app for using Reddit on iOS), said that he would would be shutting down the app on June 30 as a result of the new API pricing. He announced this decision in a lengthy post in the subreddit, which now has more than 800,000 members. In the post, Selig detailed how this change to
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