• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, June 13, 2023

Thousands of Reddit communities went dark in protest of new developer fees that the company announced in May. The protest began Monday and is expected to last through today.

More than 8,000 subreddits went dark or in read-only mode in protest of the move with the API to a fee from free.

Reddit announced May 31, the company would begin charging for calls made to its API. The organizers believe that charging for an API call will “kill every third-party app on Reddit, from Apollo to Reddit is Fun to Narwhal to BaconReader,” organizers wrote.

In protest, some of the largest communities on Reddit were set to private, not publicly available, for 48 hours. Doing this not only restricts the content from being optimized to appear in search engines like Google and Bing, but Redditors hope to put pressure on the company’s executives to reverse the decision to charge developers for access to the site.

“This isn't only a problem on the user level: many subreddit moderators depend on tools only available outside the official app to keep their communities on-topic and spam-free,” according to the post, which also says that some subreddits will “go away permanently” based on lack of resources and funds to keep it going.

The two-day blackout isn't the end goal. If things do not improve by June 14, the organizer threatens further action and sets guidelines such as “don’t be a jerk” to avoid threats and vandalism, but says to “boycott and spread the word.”

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman in a post published late last week addressed the changes in price for the API.

“There’s been a lot of confusion over what these changes mean, and I want to highlight what these changes mean for moderators and developers,” he wrote.

On May 18, the company shared that it would update access to the API, including premium access for third parties that require additional capabilities and higher usage limits.

“Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use,” he wrote.

There are still free options, but also paid options, which he outlines in the post.