Why do thousands of Reddit pages remain dark for 48 hours?

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Nearly 7,000 Reddit communities, including hundreds of millions of total subscribers, are protesting new API price changes that could wipe out third-party apps.

From June 12th to June 14th, thousands of Reddit communities, also known as subreddits, will go dark to protest planned API changes that will effectively deprecate many third-party applications. .

Self-proclaimed “the front page of the Internet,” Reddit is among the top 20 most popular websites with an estimated 430 million monthly active users.

Within 48 hours, thousands of subreddits have been switched to private mode by moderators. Only community members approved by moderators can view and participate in those channels. Other users will not be able to access the page.

Some subreddits state that it will remain offline until the planned changes are fixed or withdrawn.

What is the API and what will Reddit change?

APIs (application programming interfaces) are considered to be the backbone of the modern web. Simply put, it allows two applications to communicate with each other and allows developers to access data and build new functionality.

Like all other technology companies, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, Reddit has a public API that programmers can sign up for and use after agreeing to certain terms and conditions.

Reddit has historically provided free access to its API. However, the company announced on April 18th that it will update its API terms, including charging developers for API access. This change will take effect from 1 July 2023.

Reddit’s decision comes months after Twitter announced it would shut down all third-party apps and force people to use the platform’s official apps and website.

In an April interview with The New York Times, Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman said, “Reddit is, more than anywhere else on the internet, a place for real conversations.” .

“We have a problem crawling Reddit and creating value, but not returning anything of that value to our users,” Huffman continued.

Reddit provides a huge amount of text from various communities to help build AI (artificial intelligence) language models such as ChatGPT and Bard.

Large-scale language models use a technique called deep learning to generate text that looks like it was created by humans. These models rely on large collections of text data for training (Al Jazeera)

What does this change mean for third-party apps on Reddit?

Reddit has a large community of third-party application developers. These apps offer users additional features and customizations beyond those available on the official Reddit app and his website.

Under the new terms, applications with less than 100 queries per minute will continue to be free. According to Huffman, these make up more than 90% of his current applications.

Third-party apps that make high API requests will be charged $0.24 per 1,000 requests.

One of the most popular third-party apps to exit is Apollo, a popular iPhone and iPad app best known for its sleek user interface and custom themes.

According to Christian Selig, creator of the Apollo app, the new pricing would cost $20 million a year to continue operating at the current 7 billion requests per month.

On June 8, Selig tweeted that “Reddit’s recent decisions and actions have unfortunately made it impossible for Apollo to continue,” and that Apollo will be shutting down on June 30.

Apollo will close on June 30th. Reddit’s recent decisions and actions have unfortunately made Apollo’s continuation impossible. Thank you very much for all your support over the years. ❤️ https://t.co/HOJaLMW8fx

— Christian Selig (@ChristianSelig) June 8, 2023

Other big-name apps like Reddit is Fun, Sync and Reddplant have also announced that they are shutting down due to fees.

Following the uproar among users, Huffman, aka u/spez, defended the change Friday in an action-packed public “Ask Me Anything” forum. “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, so we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that need to use data on a large scale,” he said.

Despite widespread backlash, Huffman confirmed that the company has no plans to revise upcoming API changes.

Screenshot of r/iPhone currently set to private. (Al Jazeera)

Which subreddits will go dark?

Nearly 7,000 subreddits, including subreddits with tens of millions of subscribers, will be turned private by moderators starting June 12th. Some of the biggest communities to go dark include: