By Hera Rizwan
More than 3,000 Reddit communities have joined the protest to become "private" from Monday for up to 48 hours. This means that their messages will be invisible to anybody outside the community in the given time period. This move was triggered by Reddit's announcement about its recent developments, which entails charging the third-party apps (like Apollo and Reddit for fun) for access to its site data starting from July.
The coordinated blackout of the Reddit communities caused the entire site to temporarily crash on Monday. “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt told The Verge.
According to The Guardian, number of Reddit communities or subreddits, including r/todayilearned, r/funny, and r/gaming, each with more than 30 million subscribers, have joined the campaign, while others, including r/iPhone and r/unexpected, which each have more than one million users, have already gone private in preparation for the strike.
Why has Reddit's announcement prompted protests?
Reddit is one of the most popular niche social media platforms where a network of communities dive into their interests and hobbies. Content, on this platform, is socially curated and promoted by site members through voting. The platform is composed of hundreds of communities, known as subreddits. Each subreddit has a specific topic, such as technology, politics or music.
Reddit members, also known as redditors, submit content for the platform in form of memes or posts, which is voted on via upvotes and downvotes. The more upvotes a post gets, the more popular it becomes, and the higher up it appears on its respective subreddit or on the front page.
Reddit launched its own app in 2016. Prior to that, users who did not prefer using the web version, have been accessing the platform through third party apps like Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Slide, Comet and Boost. Reddit provided these third party apps with its API (Application Programming Interface) for free.
API, as the name suggests, is an interface with which two apps can send data back and forth between themselves. It comes with a set of defined rules enabling such communication. Therefore, free API in case of Reddit meant, anyone building an application could request data from Reddit and use that to build their own application without incurring any cost.
However, in April, Reddit announced that July onwards, it will charging for its API access. This means that developers who have made an app for Reddit would now need to pay per requests.
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Why are subreddits going private in protest?
According to redditors, they prefer these third party apps in lieu of the Reddit app because of lesser bugs and perks like customised Reddit experiences. The third party apps also often improve the experience for users in ways that Reddit does not. For example, they hide ads because the user does not want to see them, they allow the user to easily download content for sharing rather than forcing them to link to the Reddit post.
In accordance to the the changes announced by Reddit, the more popular a third party app is, the more requests it needs to make, the more money it will cost them. Therefore, thousands of subreddits have declared a 48-hour blackout in opposition to Reddit's API modifications and the impact they are having on third-party apps. Nearly 3,500 Reddit subreddits will go private for two days starting on June 12 according to theBBC.
The 3,489 subreddits that are currently blocked include most popular ones on the platform, which are, r/gaming, r/music, r/todayilearned, r/pics, and r/aww. Each of these subreddits, according to the BBC, has more than 30 million users.
Apollo, one of the wildly used third-party Reddit app for Mac and iPhone will be shutting down on June 30, as the new policy would cost them "almost $2 million dollars per month, or over $20 million per year".
What has Reddit said on the whole issue?
Addressing the API changes, Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman hosted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Friday. According to Huffman, the changes have been adopted by the social media platform, as it "needs to be a self-sustaining business".
Speaking about the blackout, he said "We respect when you and your communities take action to highlight the things you need, including, at times, going private." The executive also added, "We are all responsible for ensuring Reddit provides an open accessible place for people to find community and belonging."
Huffman said that the company will be sticking with its pricing of $0.24 per 1,000 API calls. However, the apps using less than 100 requests per minute through the OAuth client ID will be able to use the API free of charge and as of now, over 90% of the apps available today fall into this category.
In an interview to The New York Times, Huffman had said, “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable, but we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
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