Earlier this month a large chunk of Reddit went dark in protest at changes being made to the platform.
Following Twitter’s lead, Reddit now charges for access to its APIs, which are used by third-party apps. It has already led to the closure of some of the most popular Reddit apps.
More than 8,000 Reddit communities, known as subreddits, participated in a mass blackout on June 12, where they went private, preventing people from posting. These included several of the biggest subreddits on the site, including one with more than 40 million followers, and hundreds more with over one million members.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman claimed the move had no “significant revenue impact” and that “like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well,” as reported by The Verge.
However, stats published by TechCrunch show a slightly different picture. The time people spent on the site dropped by around 16% on the days of the blackout, while site visits dropped from 56 million to 52 million. Visitor behaviour has largely returned to normal since the blackout, though, according to the stats provided by Similarweb.
Why did Reddit communities up in arms?
Redditors are incensed about the company’s plans to charge sky-high fees for access to its data starting on June 19. After warning about the detrimental impact of the new pricing structure, several third-party apps announced they would shut down on June 30. They include Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Sync, and Redd Planet, among others.
The unofficial apps allow Reddit users to view and interact with the platform, and the site’s volunteer moderators to manage their sprawling communities.
Christian Selig, developer of the Apollo app, which is used by 900,000 people every day to browse Reddit, said the social media company wants to charge him $20 million (£16m) a year for access to its data-sharing software.
Twitter was widely panned for enacting a similar policy earlier this year that shut out developers and researchers from its valuable data, resulting in the demise of several third-party apps.
Subreddits protesting the changes are demanding that Reddit reduce its API pricing; allow access for apps that cater to blind people; and permit third-party apps to use content deemed not safe for work (or NSFW), including posts that contain nudity, pornography and profanity.
Broadly speaking, unofficial apps for popular services, such as Twitter or Reddit, give users more ways to interact with those platforms.
This can range from innovative features that aren’t available on official apps or more customisation tools. Some also provide a throwback experience free from divisive design changes and updates.
In addition, subreddit moderators say they rely on third-party tools to keep their communities on-topic and spam-free.
Why is Reddit charging for its data?
Reddit’s decision to cash in on its API comes as the company is preparing to file for an initial public offering later this year. Reddit mainly makes bank from digital advertising, but has struggled to monetise its user base. It also began offering a subscription service in 2020, long before the likes of Twitter and Instagram jumped on the bandwagon.
What does the Reddit blackout mean for users?
After the initial 48-hour blackout failed to have the desired effect, more than 300 subreddits with millions of subscribers have announced they’ll be set to private indefinitely. This means only approved members can access them. You can see a running tally of the participants here.
Several of the site’s most popular forums are taking part in the indefinite blackout, including r/aww, which has more than 34 million followers. Others including r/videos, r/futurology, /music, and r/dankmemes, all have millions of followers and have signalled their indefinite participation. Large communities dedicated to video games, TV shows, music and places are participating in the sweeping protest.
Some subreddits, those which offer invaluable lifelines to the users involved such as r/stopdrinking and those which provide urgent information to conflict zones including r/ukraine, are considered too important to add to the boycott.
“For such communities, we are strongly encouraging a new kind of participation: a weekly gesture of support on ‘Touch-Grass-Tuesdays’,” SpicyThunder335 posted in the r/ModCoord sub. “The exact nature of that participation — a weekly one-day blackout, an Automod-posted sticky announcement, a changed subreddit rule to encourage participation themed around the protest — we leave to your discretion.”
How has Reddit reacted?
So far, Reddit is digging its heels in.
The scale of some of the communities taking part has forced Reddit’s management to stand up and take notice. Mr Huffman acknowledged in a leaked memo to staff that “there’s a lot of noise on this one” and that it’s “amongst the noisiest we’ve seen”.
The company has also shown it is willing to try and push subreddits towards reopening, without further concessions. On Friday, it sent messages to moderators telling them that the company will help reorder the subreddit moderation ranking “if mods higher up the list are hindering reopening”.
“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,” the note continued.
The company told The Verge that this was not a threat. “That’s not how we operate,” a Reddit representative told the site. “Pressuring people is not our goal. We’re communicating expectations and how things work. Redditors want to reddit and mods want to mod. We want mods who want to mod to be able to do so.”
Threat or not, this strategy has had some success with subreddits like r/apple reopening out of fear that they would be forced open otherwise. “We want the best for this community and have no choice but to open it back up — or have it opened for us,” a moderator wrote.
Reddit is pitching this as a battle between activist moderators and the silent majority of users who just want their discussion boards back.
“If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents,” Huffman told NBC News. “So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders. And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
While moderators theoretically decide whether a subreddit is open or not, some have consulted their users before doing this — and results suggest a wider body of support than Huffman is claiming.
The poll of r/minecraft, for example, received a not-insignificant 17,631 responses, and of those 59.4 per cent voted for full private status (no new or old posts) while 31.2 per cent opted for restricted accessibility (where old content is viewable, but nothing new can be posted). Only 8.9 per cent said it should be public again.
What’s with all the pictures of John Oliver?
Some subreddits have complied with the requirement to reopen, but not in a way that’s entirely helpful to Reddit’s management. Three subreddits — r/pics (over 30 million subscribers), r/gifs (over 21 million) and r/aww (over 34 million) — have adjusted their rules to only allow content featuring the British comedian and Last Week Tonight host John Oliver.
“We — the so-called ‘landed gentry’ — definitely want to comply with the wishes of the ‘royal coury’ and they’ve told us that we need to run the subreddit in the way that its members want,” u/pics-moderator wrote, announcing a poll on how to proceed.
The votes were extremely one sided. In r/pics, “only allow images of John Oliver looking sexy” beat “return to normal” by 37,331 votes to 2,329, while “only feature GIFs of John Oliver” beat “return to normal” by 13,696 to 1,851 in r/gifs. In r/aww, 2,691 people voted for a return to normality, while 48,506 voted to allow “adorable content featuring John Oliver, Chiijohn [a John Oliver mascot], and anything else that closely resembles them.”
As a result, much of everyone’s Reddit feed is full of Oliver. The comedian himself approves of this, as he shared a huge trove of pictures on Twitter for the protesters to use.
Will Reddit reverse its API policy?
Reddit has already offered one concession in the form of an exemption from higher fees for makers of accessibility apps, as long as developers don’t monetise these tools. These services make it easier for people who are blind or have low vision to use the site with screen readers, and other accessibility software.
But beyond that, it looks like Reddit has no intention of backing down, and it has reason to believe the worst may be over.
So far, the 300-plus subreddits participating indefinitely is a far lower figure than the more than 8,000 that joined in the initial blackout. But even that equated to roughly 8 per cent of the 100,000 subreddits on Reddit.
In a memo to staff, Huffman told employees: “The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges and keep moving forward.
“We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long-term solution is improving our product and, in the short-term, we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.”
