In what is being called one of the largest user-driven protests ever to hit the platform, thousands of Reddit forums are going dark in opposition to a new policy. The voluntary blackouts, which restrict groups’ content from being publicly visible, are affecting some of Reddit’s largest online communities, including popular groups devoted to music, history, sports, and video games. The protests include more than two dozen subreddits with at least 10 million subscribers, as well as thousands of smaller networks.
These blackouts reflect widespread outrage over a Reddit plan to charge millions of dollars in fees for some third-party apps to continue accessing the platform. The plan has already forced several of Reddit’s top app-makers to announce they are closing down because they cannot afford the new costs, which are set to begin as soon as next month.
The move has created a confrontation between Reddit’s corporate management and its users and developers and has marked a turning point for the platform as it reportedly looks to go public later this year. For years, Reddit users could browse posts, write comments, and share pictures and video on Reddit from third-party apps. However, Reddit is now seeking large payments from app makers to maintain that same level of access through its application programming interface (API), in a move aimed at better monetizing Reddit users.
A lot of criticism against Reddit has been directed at the platform's steep fees, which critics believe will kill off all third-party competition against Reddit’s proprietary app. They also fear the moves will decimate a volunteer community that relies on third-party tools to do the critical work of moderating Reddit forums. Reddit has delegated its responsibility to moderate the site to its users rather than to its own paid employees or contractors, unlike some other large social networks.
Reddit’s defenders, on the other hand, have argued that Reddit has the right to set its own prices for API access since it is a business entitled to control how users access the data on the platform it provides. In his Q&A with users last Friday, Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman wrote, “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.”
The battle echoes how Twitter, under its new owner Elon Musk, recently announced its own paywall for data in a bid to develop new revenue sources and to shore up the company’s struggling finances. Twitter’s move prompted an outcry from third-party app makers, misinformation researchers, and public service account-holders who said the move would harm transparency and accessibility.
The stakes of the Reddit fight are not limited to the platform alone. It takes place against the backdrop of a wider debate about who creates the value in social networks and who gets to reap the rewards. As Reddit reportedly looks to go public later this year, the company’s value derives from the infrastructure it provides for conversation, which generates value that Reddit believes it should be able to keep.
For Reddit’s developers and moderators, however, the platform’s worth relies on the user-led moderation of the site’s countless forums, as well as the various tools and features that others have created to make Reddit more useable. Although those solutions may not have been built by Reddit itself, the company benefited from them in that they helped the site grow and reach wider audiences.
To a degree unlike Instagram or YouTube, Reddit owes its rise to the volunteer work of many of its users who bore the costs of developing features that the company did not see fit to invest in. In that respect, Reddit more closely resembles Wikipedia, the crowd-sourced digital encyclopedia whose volunteer editors are viewed as a vital resource.
Nonetheless, many Reddit users feel betrayed by the steep fees that Reddit wants to levy on third-party app makers. Some have vowed to stop using Reddit altogether, and others have suggested they may even scrub their entire account so that the company cannot monetize their historical activity. The battle between Reddit’s corporate management and its users and developers is far from over, and the coming weeks will be the ones to watch as Reddit finds a way to keep its largest communities engaged with a platform that’s changing under their feet.