Reddit Blackout: What, Why and How It is Impacting Users

Almost 8,000 subreddit forums calls for a Reddit Blackout to protest against the latest pricing policy that will charge third-party developers for accessing APIs they use to retrieve platform data and information on the Reddit platform.

On Monday, popular subreddits went into a Reddit Blackout to protest against the newly introduced pricing policy that charges fees for using Reddit Application Programming Interface (API). The new pricing policy which is reportedly very expensive, did not go down well with the Redditers which lead to this massive blackout by the subreddit moderators, also known as mods.

There are almost 2.8 billion Reddit users and 28,464 moderators who have been directly affected by this blackout that is supposed to last for a minimum of two days (48 hours).

The most popular subreddit forums like r/apple, r/videos, r/sports, r/funny, and r/gaming having millions of subscribers are vigorously participating in this enormous blackout by blocking public access to their pages and going completely private.

If the users try to access these pages, for example, while accessing r/apple, a message that says “R/apple is a private community. We stand in solidarity with numerous people who need access to the API, including bot developers, people with accessibility needs (r/blind), and 3rd party app users (Apollo, Sync, etc).” is displayed on the site.

Who will be Impacted?

The new pricing policy says that third-party developer apps like “Reddit is Fun”, “Apollo”, and “Sync” who use the user data like their posts, upvotes, and comments through APIs will be charged for the same. The third-party apps that are highly dependent on APIs and were able to access them for free until now will be charged for using these APIs starting July 1st, 2023.

Although non-profit third-party apps focused on accessibility will be an exception and won’t be charged API charges. Also, Reddit users who access the platform through its official website or application directly won’t be charged or affected.

How Much Fee will be Charged?

The actual amount of fees that the platform will charge for using APIs is yet to be revealed by Reddit but the fee prices are seemingly way too expensive for these third-party apps. Popular apps like Apollo and Sync have already threatened the platform for shutting down by June 30th as a result of these charges.

Apollo’s developer Christian Selig’s post says “The price they gave was $0.24 for 1,000 API calls. I quickly inputted this in my app and saw that it was not far off Twitter’s outstandingly high API prices, at $12,000, and with my current usage would cost almost $2 million dollars per month or over $20 million per year.”

Why is Reddit Charging after all?

The Chief Executive Officer of Reddit, Steve Huffman in a session reinforced that the charges are necessary since the company already spends millions of money on hosting its content and “needs to be fairly paid to continue supporting high-usage third-party apps.”

He also said, “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.”

With the new pricing policy comes new challenges for both the company and the users. While popular Redditers have already gone into a huge protest by “going dark”, a few third-party apps chose to remain silent.