The standoff between Redditors and Reddit continues.
What is the Reddit Blackout? A long story, thatâs what it is. The Reddit Blackout was only meant to last a couple of days. Now, as Redditors dig in to protest a series of new company policies and Reddit leadership refuses to compromise, itâs unclear how long parts of the site might stay dark. Thousands of subreddits went private on Monday primarily to protest the companyâs decision to start charging third-party developers for access to its data starting in July. The blackout was supposed to end on Wednesday morning, and some subreddits are going back online again. But others have said theyâll stay down indefinitely. Either way, weâll soon see just how much Redditor outrage and a mass subreddit outage affect Redditâs bottom line â a bottom line that motivated what Redditors are protesting against in the first place. If you donât use Reddit, you might think a bunch of internet forums going dark for a few days or even permanently has nothing to do with you. But if you use any other social media or, really, any free online platform, it may be more relevant to you than you think. The business model behind the free and open internet that lets you pay with your eyeballs instead of your wallet is changing. Your experience will, too. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and, yes, Reddit, are either seeing their massive profits [get slightly less massive]( or are feeling the pressure to make a profit at all. Even ByteDance, the parent company of the hugely popular app TikTok, [isnât immune](. Either your attention and data arenât as valuable as [they used to be](, or the platform wasnât effectively monetizing them in the first place and now it really needs to figure out how. The days of social media being free because you [are the product]( may be coming to an end. The days of getting the best experience on a platform without paying for it are definitely over. In the case of Reddit, users arenât being asked to spend money. The developers behind the apps many Redditors rely on to read and moderate the site â that is, to get the most enjoyment possible out of it â are. Theyâre pretty angry about that, and theyâve done protests like this [in the]( [past]( to make their point. But aside from a few small concessions, Reddit doesnât seem willing to change its mind on this one. The Reddit Blackout, explained For most of Redditâs history, its value was its community and users, who post, comment, and moderate forums, also known as subreddits, for free. That adds up to millions upon millions of hours of unpaid labor that Reddit really canât do without. But Reddit is not just a community; itâs also a business. Its business needs will always come first, and right now, the company says it needs to make more money. So Reddit is soon going to charge for commercial access to its [API, or application programming interface](, which several third-party developers rely on to power their own Reddit-based apps. Those apps are often better, faster, and have more features than Redditâs own. Reddit is also cutting sexually explicit content off from those third-party user interface apps entirely, while still allowing it on its official app. Reddit says the vast majority of services that use its API will not be affected and that non-commercial tools that help moderators wonât be charged. Reddit is also rolling out its own moderator tools to replace what theyâll likely lose once the API changes are implemented. When Reddit first announced it would start charging for API access in April, it [framed the decision]( as a response to generative AI companies that scrape its content to build their lucrative large language models while paying Reddit nothing in return. Reddit app developers probably didnât think they would be affected. After all, their products are supposed to make the Reddit experience better, and Redditâs been just fine with that for many years. But at the end of May, Christian Selig, the developer behind Apollo, one of the most popular Reddit apps, [said that]( Reddit was going to charge him an estimated $20 million a year for access to its API. Thatâs much more than Apollo was pulling in, and, Selig believed, far more than it cost Reddit to let his app operate. He later [announced]( that Apollo would shut down on June 30, the day before Redditâs new prices are set to take effect. Several other third-party apps [have said]( they plan to shut down, too. Seeing the impact that Redditâs cost-cutting plan would soon have on them, a group of Redditors, many of whom are moderators, organized a temporary boycott, with participating subreddits going private or restricted for 48 hours starting on Monday. A [Twitch stream]( tracking the blackout claimed that nearly 8,500 subreddits, some with tens of millions of subscribers, had gone dark by Tuesday afternoon. As many as 6,500 remained dark on Wednesday morning. The blackout has certainly had some short-term impact, including lots of media attention and even temporarily causing Reddit to [crash entirely]( because it couldnât handle so many subreddits going private at the same time. But the long-term effect remains to be seen. Again, while the blackout was only supposed to last two days, some subreddits have said theyâll stay down indefinitely, and others are in the middle of deciding what to do next. When the API pricing changes take effect on July 1 and the third-party apps shut down, weâll see just how important they were to Redditors and therefore Reddit itself. âItâs important that Reddit monetize, and most moderators want Reddit to succeed,â said Sarah Gilbert, research manager of Cornellâs Citizens and Technology Lab. âI think there is a compromise thatâs mutually beneficial to and minimally disruptive to both Reddit, its moderators, and its users. I hope that compromise is reached.â But Reddit doesnât seem interested in a compromise. CEO Steve Huffman said in [a letter]( to employees that he expected this âto passâ like âall blowups on Reddit.â Reddit has made a few small concessions in response to outcry, like [promising]( that accessibility apps wonât be subject to the API pricing and that moderators will be able to see sexually explicit content on all public subreddits to help them make moderating decisions. Company spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt told Vox that Reddit isnât planning any additional changes. Reddit says it just wants to be âfairly paidâ for its API. And you can see the companyâs point. It costs Reddit money to provide the services that its API needs to function, so itâs basically paying for another developer to make money (Apollo, for instance, has 50,000 users who pay to use the app). And those apps donât have Redditâs ads on them, which means Redditâs not directly making money from those eyeballs. Reddit is also [reportedly]( preparing for an IPO later this year and needs to shore up its finances. That situation might explain the companyâs [recent layoffs](, though downsizing has become [standard]( [practice]( in the [tech industry]( at this point. Seemingly every platform is scrambling to make more money while spending less. On the other hand, Reddit was happy to outsource these tools to third-party developers for years. It didnât even have its own mobile app [until 2016](, when it replaced Alien Blue, a third-party app it had acquired in 2014, with a new Reddit-branded app. The Reddit app still doesnât have some of the features and tools that many third-party apps do â and that a lot of users clearly want. Instead of making its own app as good as those, Reddit made a decision that will likely shut down those other apps with almost no warning for their users. It was always possible that something like this could happen on Reddit, but you canât blame developers if they assumed it wouldnât after all this time. Why Silicon Valley wants you to pay for what used to be free The fact is, Reddit is not the only platform doing something like this. Advertising isnât as valuable as it used to be, and your eyeballs and data increasingly arenât enough to justify free services anymore. So thereâs been a broader shift to a paid business model in the social media industry. Now, everyone from Meta and Twitter wants literal money from you, and theyâre being a lot more aggressive about getting it. Paid offerings â including Redditâs own [Premium]( service, which gives users an ad-free experience, more customization options, and access to an exclusive subreddit â used to be nice little add-ons to existing services rather than a significant source of revenue. But lately, some social media platforms are seeing them as being a much bigger and more necessary revenue generator. Elon Muskâs Twitter is the epitome of this these days. While heâs avoided [paying the rent]( for its office space and laid off the vast majority of its employees â consequences like lawsuits and [reduced functionality]( be damned â Musk is trying to squeeze every possible dollar out of Twitterâs users. That includes pushing a new version of the paid Twitter Blue service, which effectively makes Twitterâs free experience much worse in order to entice more people to pay. There are also changes to Twitter for Business, which is trying to wring tens of thousands of dollars out of brands, and â this may sound familiar â [charging for]( API access. For its part, Rathschmidt, the Reddit spokesperson, told Vox itâs just a coincidence that Twitter rolled this paid API plan out before Reddit did, saying âwe donât look to other social platforms to make business decisions.â Perhaps it was also a coincidence that Meta introduced a paid verification plan [shortly after]( Twitter did. Metaâs version lets Facebook and Instagram users pay a monthly fee for better customer service, increased visibility, and a blue âverifiedâ check. Meta actually verifies these users, too, by asking them to provide a government ID to prove they are who they say they are; Twitter does not. Also unlike Twitter, Meta isnât yet taking features away from its free users to make its paid service more desirable. For now, many social media services still offer a version of their service thatâs free for users. You can still post a photo on Instagram or send a tweet without paying a subscription fee. Weâll have to wait to see if the more aggressive pay-to-play schemes like Twitter Blue are a boon or a bust to these companiesâ business models and how that affects the future of the industry. We donât yet know if the Redditor outrage over the API decision will lead to a real, long-term drop in users and revenue. Reddit doesnât think it will, and itâs very possible that people will stick with Reddit because thereâs nowhere comparable for them to go, as has been the case for many of Twitterâs dissatisfied users in the Musk era. Their user experience wonât be what it was with their favorite third-party app, but it might still be good enough to stick around â until and unless the next paid Reddit feature shows up and makes the free offering even worse, anyway. âReddit is built on volunteer moderation labor, including the creation and maintenance of many tools,â Gilbert said. âChanges like these, particularly the poor communication surrounding them, risks diminishing motivation among existing mods, increasing burnout, and it may be more challenging to find and recruit new moderators.â With Reddit sticking to its guns and other platforms making similar moves, it may be something the moderators â and the rest of us who got used to everything being free for so long â have to live with in the new paid social media era. âSara Morrison, senior reporter [A drawing of a woman looking at a computer with a warning message on the screen.]( Xia Gordon for Vox and Capital B [AI automated discrimination. 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