Reddit’s users are protesting

Imagine walking into your favorite neighborhood and nearly all the shops, restaurants, and parks are closed.

This is what Reddit felt like yesterday morning. And for anyone who relies on Googling “[thing you need to know] + reddit” as the primary way to find actual, non-SEO optimized information online, that’s a big problem.

🤔 What’s going on?... Almost 8,000 different Reddit communities – or “subreddits” – with a collective subscriber count of nearly 3 billion users went private this morning, as part of a coordinated blackout for at least two days to protest Reddit's forthcoming plan to charge for access to its vast reserves of data starting July 1.

The new fee structure, according to the protest, threatens third-party developers who have relied on accessing Reddit’s data for free via the platform’s back-end, or “API.” One such third-party app, Apollo, says it would need to pay over $20 million/year to service its customers moving forward.

• Per Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, allowing free access to its data runs counter to the company’s goal of becoming a self-sustaining business.
• The company, which was founded in 2005 and makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform, is also preparing for a possible IPO later this year.

🧑‍💻 Elsewhere in Silicon Valley: Reddit isn’t the only platform that’s recently shut off access to its API. In April, Twitter increased the cost of accessing its data, causing many third-party developers to shut down the apps they’d built on top of the Twitter API.