At midnight on Tuesday, the moderators of the Reddit community r/Gaming decided to go dark, CNBC reported. Dac Croach, who goes by the username Dacvack, and the subreddits’s other leaders hit the private button, initiating a 48-hour shutdown for the group’s more than 37 million members, along with anyone else who tried to access the community.
They were joining a large-scale protest against Reddit, which was about to implement a business change that would dramatically increase the price for third-party developers to use the company’s application programming interface, or API. In the preceding days, the r/Gaming moderators had run a poll indicating that users would support a shutdown. They discussed the results on Slack, and then went offline.
According to CNBC, the widespread protest of one of the internet’s most-trafficked sites started early this week and quickly expanded to more than 8,000 subreddits, including the widely popular r/Funny, with over 40 million members, along with r/Music and r/Science, each boasting over 30 million users.
Techradar reported that Reddit’s CEO wants to bring an end to the Reddit Blackout, but not by agreeing to reverse the company’s upcoming API changes. Instead, he has suggested that users should be able to vote out the moderators leading the protest that’s keeping large chunks of Reddit in the dark.
Thanks to the blackout, Reddit (and by extension Google) feels like a shell of itself for many users. The initially two-day-long protest has been extended by many of its subreddit communities, with 4,906 still set to private or restricted – including Reddit’s largest community r/Funny. While private users are unable to post or read content from the subreddit, restricted subreddits have merely banned new posts (but old posts can still be read).
TechCrunch reported that Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is not backing down amid protests against API changes made by the platform. In interviews with The Verge, NBCNews, and NPR, Huffman defended business decisions made by the company to charge third-party apps saying the API wasn’t designed to support these clients.
According to TechCrunch, the Reddit co-founder also talked about protesting moderators, changing site rules, and profitability in these interviews. The platform is facing one of its strongest backlashes from the community, but the CEO seemingly doesn’t want to budge.
In response to Huffman’s comments, TechCrunch reported, that moderators are trying to find ways to make blackouts effective. Alternatively, some communities are also setting up servers on alternative sits like Lemmy and Kibn.
NPR reported that Reddit, which was founded in 2005, has long relied on advertising. It, along with peer social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, Snap, YouTube and others, has been dealing with a slowdown in digital ad spending, which has pressured the companies to find new ways to generate revenue.
Personally, I think that the people who participated in the blackout are not going to back down. The longer the protest lasts, the less likely that companies who want to place ads in Reddit will choose to do that. I think the CEO probably made a big mistake when he jacked up the price for third-party Reddit apps.