The protest started when CEO and co-founder of Reddit, Steve Huffman, announced a change in the company's business model, which requires large commercial companies seeking access to data on the site to now pay for it.
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Following the decision, subreddits – community forums on the site - went dark, meaning they were no longer accessible to non-members or were available in a read-only mode, with the ability to post and interact disabled.
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Large commercial companies seeking access to data on Reddit now have to pay for it
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Huffman's intention was primarily to sell to big players, specifically artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI and Microsoft, who use the site's data to train their language models. However, in practice, what Reddit is doing is putting a price on access to content generated by its users, not Reddit itself.
However, it quickly became apparent that this move would not only affect technology giants. Even smaller developers who create applications built on the site's application programming interface (API), previously available for free, would now have to pay.
One of them, Apollo, a favorite app among Reddit forum moderators as a platform management tool, has already announced that it will not be able to afford the hefty fees of over $20 million per year and will be forced to shut down the application.
Without third-party applications, the moderators were left with only the original Reddit app as a management tool, which they have always criticized, much like the site's design. The company has relied, in fact, on third-party developers to improve the user experience on the site, and Reddit did benefit from their contributions, but now it is essentially kicking them out without prior notice.
Despite the fuss, Huffman refused to backtrack and stated that Reddit will persist to assert its right to be a profitable company. In a Q&A session with site users, he said that the company "will remain ad-driven until the profits come. We, unlike some third-party apps (that rely on Reddit's API), are not profitable."
Huffman plans to take the company public on the New York Stock Exchange next year, with a valuation of over $15 billion. His latest move is an attempt to entice potential investors. "Look, now we have a variety of revenue streams, and maybe one day we'll even profit from the whole story," he said.
A list of all moderators participating in the protest is estimated to be in the thousands at this stage. Considering that there are over a hundred thousand active communities on the site, the protest would need to grow significantly to cause a substantial impact.
Even if the blackout continues and intensifies, it remains uncertain whether it will truly be a decisive moment for the site, leading to a mass exodus of users. Taking into account past experiences with platforms like Twitter and protests following changes in business models, the situation is far from definitive.