Hundreds Of Subreddits With Millions Of Users Are Going Dark: Here's Why

The Reddit community is up in arms against the recent policy change at Reddit, which seeks to impose a flat fee on its APIs, just like Twitter. Reddit APIs — short for application programming interface — are the code blocks that allow third-party software to talk with a platform by using its data. Everything from community bots to third-party apps rely on these APIs for user interactions, but putting a high price on these connections puts these platforms at severe financial risk.

Earlier in June, the developer of popular Reddit client Apollo explained how the beloved app was on the verge of shutting down because Reddit was demanding an annual fee of around $20 million based on the number of API requests made by Apollo. However, it's not just Apollo that's at risk here, but every other third-party client and bot — especially those moderating content safety — that keeps sub-Reddits safe and engaging is under threat.

To protest Reddit's "predatory" API pricing, hundreds of sub-Reddits are shutting down, starting June 12, for two days. A shutdown means the status of these communities — some of which have over 30 million subscribers — will have their status changed from public to private. 

That means, except for existing members, no Reddit user will be able to see the content shared in these sub-Reddits or join these communities. The minds behind the move say their protest will continue until Reddit offers "reasonable terms."

A post regarding the protest says the platform's move "threatens to kill many beloved third-party mobile apps, making a great many quality-of-life features not seen in the official mobile app permanently inaccessible to users." One of those quality-of-life features is content moderation, which happens manually and requires hours of volunteer work, as well as via bots that rely on APIs to clean spam and graphic content.

The long list of sub-Reddits highlighted in the post will start with a two-day shutdown, but some will continue with the protest and "might go away permanently" if Reddit refuses to correct its API course. Members have been advised to stay away from Reddit during the shutdown phase and make noise about the policy change elsewhere.

Reddit, on the other hand, contends that its platform data is valuable and that the company is in no mood to offer it for free, especially to AI labs for training their chatbots and conversational AI products. But the move is pretty damaging, irrespective of scale.

While a product as popular as Apollo could amass as much as $20 million in API fees owed to Reddit, even apps with as few as 1,000 users could end up paying anywhere from $8,000 to $30,000 in API fees per year, for as few as 100 API calls per user daily. More importantly, this could set a precedent for more platforms to follow, effectively ending the era of good third-party clients and bots.