In response to Reddit’s impending API pricing changes, over 6,000 subreddits, including popular communities such as r/funny, r/aww, r/gaming, r/music, and r/science, have decided to make themselves private as a form of protest.
This means that these communities are no longer accessible to the general public, even to users who were previously subscribed to them on Reddit. A Twitch stream has been set up to track the exact number of subreddits that have gone dark during this protest.
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The decision to take such action was initiated by moderators who began planning last week after learning that developers of beloved third-party Reddit apps would be unable to afford the updated API pricing set by the platform.
On Thursday, the developers of popular apps like Apollo for Reddit announced their intention to shut down their services on June 30th due to the API changes.
As part of the ongoing protest, numerous subreddits have chosen to go private for a period of 48 hours, starting from June 12th and extending until June 14th.
However, as indicated in a pinned post on the subreddit r/Save3rdPartyApps, certain communities have expressed their intention to remain private until the desired changes are implemented.
Amidst the protest, certain subreddits like r/NintendoSwitch, r/Frugal, and r/StarWars have opted for a different approach by imposing restrictions on new posts. While existing posts can still be viewed, moderators of these communities are temporarily disallowing the submission of new content throughout the duration of the protest.
On the other hand, r/DankMemes remains publicly accessible, but it strictly permits users to exclusively post memes related to the API changes.
Within the subreddit r/ModCoord, there are four separate threads that provide an “incomplete and expanding list of participating subreddits.” This compilation includes numerous well-known communities with substantial subscriber counts, emphasizing the broad scale of the protest across Reddit.
