Thousands of subreddits remain dark as Reddit refuses to back down

The Reddit community is continuing to protest over the company’s recent API policy changes. Thousands of subreddits are still dark or private, long beyond the originally planned 48-hour blackout that ended Tuesday. The social network has refused to back down from the planned changes.

This mass protest began on Monday after Reddit announced plans to charge for access to its APIs. The company claims that the new fees will help make the platform profitable and also monetize its data, which many companies are using to train their LLMs (Large Language Models) for generative AI tools.

However, this policy also applies to indie developers who rely on Reddit APIs for their third-party apps. More importantly, the money that the company is asking for is a lot more than what these apps make. Unable to bear the operating cost, several third-party Reddit apps are shutting down at the end of this month.

This angered the Reddit community. The effects of the proposed API policy changes on moderator tools made the matter worse. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman publicly lashing out at some developers further fueled the anger. On Monday, more than 8,000 subreddits went private in protest, blocking access for people who aren’t already subscribed. These include some of the most popular communities with tens of millions of subscribers.

Many of those subreddits are dark long beyond the original plan

The plan was to remain private for 48 hours, though a few hundred of them pledged to continue the protest indefinitely. Turns out they motivated others as well. As of this writing, more than 4,000 subreddits are still private, while many others are restricted. Among them are some big names such as r/funny,  r/videos, r/music, r/aww, and r/science. Restricted subreddits don’t allow users to submit new content but existing content is accessible for all.

Meanwhile, Redding has announced that the decision is final. It won’t back down from the proposed API policy changes. “We’re not planning any changes to the API updates we’ve previously announced,” a company spokesperson told The Guardian. “Expansive access to data has impact and costs involved; we spend multimillions of dollars on hosting fees and Reddit needs to be fairly paid to continue supporting high-usage third-party apps.”

This came after Huffman encouraged employees to stick to the plan in an internal memo earlier this week, saying that the protest hasn’t affected the company’s revenue and things will be normal soon. “There’s a lot of noise with this one [ongoing protest]. Among the noisiest we’ve seen… and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well,” Huffman said. “We absolutely must ship what we said we would.”