Several communities on the popular social media platform Reddit, including popular crypto subreddits, unanimously decided to go private for 48 hours to protest controversial charges against developers of third-party apps.
A total of 3,489 subreddits have gone dark in protest, including five of the 10 most popular communities on the site – r/gaming, r/aww, r/Music, r/todayilearned, and r/pics – which each have memberships of more than 30 million people.
Now, Reddit has introduced a series of charges to the developers who wish to continue using its Application Programming Interface (API) – the behind-the-scenes code which allows third-party apps to find and show the content on Reddit. All four of these apps have said they will be shutting down as a result of Reddit’s new API pricing.
Reddit, which is also planning for an IPO, is asking developers to pay $12,000 for every 50 million requests. The Apollo developer said that it would cost him 20 million US dollars per year to use Reddit’s APIs.
BBC reported that the protest could go on longer than 48 hours on some subreddits as the community demands Reddit to roll back the changes.