Reddit communities go dark for 48 hours

[NeedMyLink]

Some of the largest communities on Reddit will close their doors (make "private") in protest of the site's decision to try to monetize access to their data.

Some 7,000 Reddit communities, with hundreds of millions of subscribers, are protesting new API pricing changes that could kill third-party apps. Starting today and running through June 14, they will become "private" so that no one outside the community can see their posts.

Forums such as r/todayilearned, r/funny and r/gaming, each with more than 30 million subscribers, have signed up to participate in the campaign.

The protest is prompted by a series of upcoming changes to the site's "API" that will allow other companies to use Reddit data in their products and services. The changes will impose a huge fee for "premium access," which will effectively destroy popular third-party Reddit apps such as Apollo, which allow users to browse the site with a customizable interface.

Unfortunate news for those who get traffic from Reddit. Your thoughts about this?

 

[awesomewebsites]

Why can't Reddit take action against this?

 

[Degen]

Why can't Reddit take action against this?

Good luck replacing 3k mods that do the work for free, and that is with third party apps to make life easier.


r/videos is going dark permanently until it is resolved

 

[awesomewebsites]

Good luck replacing 3k mods

Can't that be handled with fraction of additional revenue they will get.

 

[TheSplinter]

Good luck replacing 3k mods that do the work for free, and that is with third party apps to make life easier.


r/videos is going dark permanently until it is resolved

They probably can with AI, in a not so distant future.

 

[wano]

very very annoying for me

 

[kavo]

Can't that be handled with fraction of additional revenue they will get.

I dunno if he is right about 3k mods, but hiring so many people in US would cost around $150-250 million per year. Reddit makes ~300-500 per year in revenue, not profit. Now with going dark it will be cut in half.
And it's questionable whether they will be profiting more with these API + 3rd party app changes. So basically it's not that boring as you might think

 

[flprocess]

I Guess reddit really found themselves with an issue on this one, but what history has taught us is that everything will be forgotten at some point.

 

[Degen]

I dunno if he is right about 3k mods, but hiring so many people in US would cost around $150-250 million per year. Reddit makes ~300-500 per year in revenue, not profit. Now with going dark it will be cut in half.
And it's questionable whether they will be profiting more with these API + 3rd party app changes. So basically it's not that boring as you might think

30 of my subreddits are dark, r/science has like a few hundred mods . Average of 5 mods per subreddit (over 200k subs)

 

[Degen]

Can't that be handled with fraction of additional revenue they will get.

It can, but that would go against their "freedom of speech"

 

[awesomewebsites]

It can, but that would go against their "freedom of speech"

The move they have decided to take is already it. No?

 

[Myran]

It sucks but it was inevitable anyway. You can enjoy free pizzas everyday but the moment you start to pack those in shiny boxes made by you and sell for money, the pizza man will obviously be pissed. You’d be making very popular boxes and would’ve spent hundreds or thousands of hours on it but still. Musk started this trend with twitter, surely Reddit won’t be the last to jump into that bandwagon.

 

[Squrr]

Might be a coincidence but my NSFW subreddit traffic went up decent amount today, maybe they have nothing else to do.

 

[kavo]

Might be a coincidence but my NSFW subreddit traffic went up decent amount today, maybe they have nothing else to do.

Finally someone benefiting from these big services' updates

 

[Degen]

Might be a coincidence but my NSFW subreddit traffic went up decent amount today, maybe they have nothing else to do.

There was a bug last week where traffic seemingly doubled. But it was just the detection that was being sh*t.

 

[tziahs]

Reddit is really in a tough spot. They want to monetize the platform even more, but the users will be pissed. I guess we will see where this goes.

 

[karupoiss]

Reddit is really in a tough spot. They want to monetize the platform even more, but the users will be pissed. I guess we will see where this goes.

They want to monetize people who ban any kind of promotional content and hate ads. They brought this upon themselves. They created a system where any kind of promotion (even ones random content posts) are hated on.

 

[IcaroAugusto]

This will be a huge pressure on Reddit, but not sure they will step back on these changes.

 

[daverawcus]

Is the reddit api still working for free atm?

 

[akacash]

Some funny stuff here. Why in the world would replacing mods be any sort of violation of free speech? The reason that Reddit is rolling out this new system is in anticipation of their upcoming IPO. They want and kind of need to be able to show more earning potential than what they have now, which obv benefits them by raising their value and price, so that's why this is happening now. It should be really interesting because normally the 3rd party little guys end up having to either eat it or move on but Reddit is a unique community so I'm really curious to see how this plays out.