In the past few days a large number of Reddit forums have gone dark. Last week saw some of the largest subreddits close their space in a protest against a new policy by developers.
Subreddits such as r/aww, r/pics and r/music which had millions of followers, took part in the protest. According to reports, more than 7000 subreddits were shut down in the protest and around 3,600 remain closed.
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With the tag line "the front-page of the internet" Reddit was created back in 2005 as a social news website where people could create communities and discuss particular topics in different forums.
Forums were known as ‘subreddits’ and while Reddit was growing as a popular website, it wasn’t until in 2016 when it launched it’s official app. During these years, third party apps such as Apollo, Sync and Reddplanet were created for users to browse the platform on their phones free of charge as well contain some features that aren’t available on the Reddit app.
The policy that is being protested is one that would see Reddit charge third party apps to access data on their app. The latest policy by Reddit has placed a bill on these third party apps to access their data, with apps like Apollo being asked to pay as much as $1.6 million a month to continue operating.
Third party apps have said that they cannot afford the charges and will be shutting down their service. In a long post, Apollo developer, Christian Selig announced that the app will be shutting down on June 30 and said that “"It's much cheaper for me to simply shut down."
In what has been a stand off between creators and users of Reddit, subreddit moderators were asked to reopen the forums during the lockdown by developers in exchange for privileges.
A not sent to moderators read: "If there are mods here who are willing to work towards reopening this community, we are willing to work with you to process a Top Mod Removal request or reorder the mod team to achieve this goal if mods higher up the list are hindering reopening. We would handle this request and any retaliation attempts here in this modmail chain immediately.
"Our goal is to work with the existing mod team to find a path forward and make sure your subreddit is made available for the community which makes its home here. If you are not able or willing to reopen and maintain the community, please let us know."
After the reopening of a number of subreddits in the week long protest, the latest stunt by protestors has been to inundate the app with pictures of celebrities like Don Cheadle, John Oliver and Apple CEO Tim Cook taking away from the usual Reddit experience.
Some subreddits have taken their protests to the extreme by allowing users to upload sexually explicit content on a subreddit that is historically safe for work in order to prevent app developers from monetising the subreddit with adverts.
So far there has been no sign of any form of reconciliation and in a response to the protests Reddit CEO Steve Huffman doubled down on their decision.
Speaking to the Associated Press he said: "Protest and dissent is important,”
“The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything because we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on.”
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