Reddit announced on May 31 that the fee would be required to be paid through a third-party application, and in response, the platform’s communities cited concerns of going out of business starting Monday (June 12). They have threatened a blackout of 48 hours.
Making their posts private prevents visitors from outside the community from seeing them.
The community outlined three demands in response to the announcement that focused on Reddit’s application programming interface (API), accessibility for the blind, and access to content that is not suitable for work (NSFW).
Founded in 2005, Reddit is one of the 20 most popular social media sites.
Additionally, a Reddit post claims that thousands of subreddits, ranging from 5,000 to over 40 million users, are participating in blackout protests.
Forums such as r/todayilearned, r/funny, and r/gaming, each with more than 30 million subscribers, have signed up to join, while others with 1 million plus members, including r/ The iPhone and r/unexpected have already gone private. On the strike call, JEE News reported.
It has a total of over 28,000 moderators and over 2.6 billion users.
According to JEE News report, participating subreddits are going private and will not be available during the blackout.
The changes will effectively kill third-party Reddit apps like Apollo, which allow users to browse the site with a customized interface, while introducing hefty fees for “premium access.”
According to Apollo’s sole developer Christian Selig, such apps would need to charge about $5 per user just to cover the new Reddit fees.
However, there is another reason behind the Reddit controversy: a conflict between the social network and AI firms such as OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, which have used large amounts of data from the service to train their systems.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Reddit founder and chief executive Steve Huffman told JEE News in April. “But we don’t need to give away all that value to some of the biggest companies in the world for free.”
In a group statement, moderators of the thousands of subreddits joining the protest said: “On June 12, many subreddits will be going dark to protest this policy. Some will return after 48 hours. Will: Others will be gone permanently until this issue is fixed. Adequate attention is given as many moderators are unable to work with the poor tools available through the official app.”
The statement added: “This is not something any of us do lightly: We do what we do because we love Reddit, and we believe that this change will It will be impossible to do what we love.”
By banding together like this, the moderators hope to pressure Reddit’s management to consider the new charges and address their concerns.
Additionally, the blackout serves as a reminder of how important third-party apps are to improving the Reddit user experience and offering additional features that the official app has.
