The big Reddit protest has failed
A protest seeking to convince Reddit to cancel its exorbitant API fees has failed, Gizmodo reports.
The last big holdouts in the protest — the r/aww, r/pics, and r/videos subreddits — have dropped rules which only allowed users to make posts relating to television host John Oliver.
The subreddits had over 91 million subscribers between them.
While they switched their communities back to public from private several weeks ago, they introduced “John Oliver rules”, which prevented members from making posts unless they featured the Last Week Tonight host.
This was one of several workarounds that subreddit admins found to show support for the protest without losing their privileges as the appointed managers of their communities.
A Twitch channel tracking the number of subreddits participating in the protest in real-time has also stopped streaming.
Its last-known tally of protesting subreddits was 1,951 on 24 July 2023.
A breakdown of what happened
The much-publicised protest was prompted by Reddit announcing it would start charging for access to its API from June 2023.
Up to that point, Reddit allowed developers to feed information from the popular online discussion platform into third-party apps for free.
But Reddit corporate argued that this cost the company millions, while the developers could monetise their apps and make huge profits, effectively leeching off Reddit’s infrastructure at no cost.
However, the high proposed API fees and the intention to implement them just a month after the announcement sparked widespread backlash.
Many users also argued that the Reddit mobile app’s features and functionality were lacking when compared to some third-party options.
In mid-June, nearly 9,000 subreddits went “dark” by switching from public to private. This made it near-impossible to view their content.
During the first few days of the protest Reddit suffered outages, and the unavailability of subreddit content negatively impacted its Google Search results.
While the majority of subreddits only took part in the protest for the initial 48 hours, thousands maintained their private status for well over a month.
Reddit hit back by seizing some major subreddits it regarded as being “abandoned”.
To bypass this intervention, some subreddits switched to posting adult-only content.
In addition to making it more difficult for Reddit to kick the admins off and take over the subreddits, it made it impossible to monetise the communities, costing Reddit ad revenue.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who came under heavy fire from Reddit users throughout the protest, remained resolute and told employees that the “blowup” would pass.
The company’s patience has now paid off, with many subreddits likely fearing they will simply be replaced by alternative communities that will post about the same topics.
The change has come at the cost of several popular third-party Reddit apps — including Apollo and Reddit is Fun — which shut down as the fees first came into effect.
Now read: Reddit beats film companies who wanted torrent user identities exposed
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