The 48-hour Reddit “Blackout” is technically coming to an end. However, the company’s blasé attitude about this issue, which clearly excites many of its users, could end up backfiring. And this planned two-day protest may be extended on some subreddit communities… indefinitely.
Monday, thousands of subreddits became private, blocking access to years of content that fills every niche community. For what? These subreddits are protest Recent company changes to get rid of free API access for developers. In its place, Reddit is rolling out a premium paid model for developers seeking API access for its apps.
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One of Reddit’s most popular third-party apps, Apollo for Reddit, has already announced that it you have to close due to these changes, the solo developer running the application could not afford the newly needed $20 million per year in API costs.
Fast forward to today. Tuesday, more than 24 hours after the start of the demonstration, The edge(opens in a new tab) released a company-wide internal memo from Reddit CEO Steve Huffman in which Huffman downplayed the impact of the user protests.
“There’s a lot of noise with this one,” Huffman wrote. “Some of the loudest we’ve seen. Know that our teams are on it, and like all expansions on Reddit, this one will also go through.”
Reddit went down amid a protest over the company’s new policy
“We absolutely have to ship what we said we would do,” he continued, referring to the root cause of the protest – Reddit’s plans to start charging exorbitant fees to developers for access to the API.
Huffman also added that Reddit hasn’t seen “a significant revenue impact so far” due to the protest.
It’s clear that Reddit is trying to put these protests behind them as quickly as possible and roll out its new paid API next month as the company looks to boost revenue. publish Later this year.
However, it may not be that simple. The event may not end when the first 48 hours are up. Indeed, according to dark red(opens in a new tab)a website that has been tracking subreddits participating in the blackout, the protest appears to be growing.
When Apollo for Reddit, the largest of the apps affected by the API changes, first announced its closure, just over 3,000 subreddits announced they were taking part in the API protest. . On Monday morning, when the protests began, more than 6,500 subreddits died down. even reddit went down temporarily quite on Monday due to the action.
On Tuesday night, when things should technically end, over 8,400 subreddits went private.
Of the 47 subreddits with more than 10 million members, only r/photoshopbattles was not participating in the protest Tuesday night. These include some of the biggest communities on the platform like r/funny, which has over 40 million members. Major subreddits with over 30 million members like r/aww, r/gaming, r/Music, r/science and r/todayilearned have also gone private in protest.
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And things may not “move” as quickly as Reddit hopes, either. Some subreddits, like r/iPhone(opens in a new tab) And r/Apple(opens in a new tab), plan to stay private “indefinitely”. Based on CEO Huffman’s memo, it doesn’t look like Reddit is going to budge on the API changes, and a good number of Redditors seem to want to keep fighting until the company reconsiders those plans.
