World of Warcraft Subreddit to Return Private Indefinitely in Protest of API Pricing
After participating in a 48-hour blackout protest against Reddit's decision to charge third-party developers for API access, moderators of the World of Warcraft subreddit have announced that the subreddit will be indefinitely returning to private mode in continued protest. This past April, Reddit announced plans to charge for access to its API in order to combat companies using it to train AI programs, citing them as extremely profitable big companies benefitting from Reddit's API for free.
Soon after, several companies and developers of third party apps began to speak out against this change, including the developer of Apollo, who reported that their ~1.5 million users would cost approximately $20 million a year — a completely untenable figure. As several third party developers including Apollo announced plans to shutdown, Redditors began to coordinate a protest in response.
Run predominantly by teams of volunteer moderators, approximately 8,000 subreddits big and small coordinated to change their boards to a private state and decline all requests for user access for 48 hours, including r/funny, r/aww, r/gaming, r/Music, r/Pics, r/science, r/todayilearned. While many of them have since reopened, several remain committed to the blackout — now including r/wow, which appears committed to remaining private in protest for the indefinite future.
Hi all.As you may have noticed, we opened the sub back up to a restricted state after the 48 hour period we committed to before. After reading over the feedback we received, on the post and in modmail, we have decided to take the sub back private, indefinitely.
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