Parts of Reddit ‘going dark’ in protest of developer fees

Communities on the online message board Reddit are “going dark” to protest new fees the site is charging third-party developers. 

Some sections of the site are being set to private for 48 hours as part of the protest, which started Monday, meaning some of the largest communities on Reddit won’t be publicly viewable during the protest. 

The protest came after third-party developers that use Reddit said they would be shutting down over new fees to Reddit’s API, or application programming interface. For example, the creator of the Reddit app Apollo, which aims to help users navigate the platform faster, said it will shut down at the end of June because Reddit’s changes have “unfortunately made it impossible for Apollo to continue.” 

Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt said the platform is in contact with a “number of communities to clarify any confusion around our Data API Terms.”

“Expansive access to data has impact and costs involved; we spend multi-millions of dollars on hosting fees and Reddit needs to be fairly paid to continue supporting high-usage third-party apps. Our pricing is based on usage levels that we measure to be comparable to our own costs,” Rathschmidt wrote in an email summarizing what was shared with the community of developers. 

He added that the “vast majority of API users” won’t have to pay for access, and not all third-party app usage requires paid access. 

In response to the protest, Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman hosted an “AMA,” or “ask me anything,” session on the site recently and told users, “We respect when you and your communities take action to highlight the things you need, including, at times, going private. We are all responsible for ensuring Reddit provides an open accessible place for people to find community and belonging.”

The protest also limited access to the entirety of Reddit.

According to DownDetector, Reddit outages peaked around 10:30 a.m. and the platform appeared to be running again within an hour. 

Rathschmidt said in response to the outages that “a significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue.”