Hundreds of Reddit communities stay darkish as protest continues

Hundreds of subreddits are persevering with to protest past the preliminary 48-hour blackout, as Reddit says it has no plans to again down from the modifications it’s making to its API. As of this writing, one counter lists over 5,000 subreddits which might be nonetheless darkish, which embrace among the website’s hottest communities with tens of tens of millions of subscribers every. 

Some, similar to r/humorous, r/aww, r/Music, r/science, and r/movies are personal and stay inaccessible. Others, like r/pics and r/Artwork are restricted, that means it’s attainable to view previous posts however not submit new content material. In these two instances, the final new posts from the group have been on June twelfth earlier than the protest started.

At its peak, Reddark was reporting that over 8,000 subreddits had gone darkish in protest. The sheer quantity of subreddits setting themselves to personal additionally brought on stability points for the positioning extra usually, with customers struggling to entry the remaining public content material. 

When it initially introduced the API modifications in April, Reddit pitched them as a method the corporate might receives a commission by AI researchers trying to make use of the content material on its website to coach giant language fashions (LLMs). Nevertheless it’s additionally a part of a push to make the corporate worthwhile forward of an anticipated IPO later this yr. “Two issues occurred on the similar time: the LLM explosion put all Reddit information use on the forefront, and our persevering with efforts to reign in prices to make Reddit self-sustaining put a highlight on the tens of tens of millions of {dollars} it prices us yearly to assist the [third-party] apps,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman wrote in response to a query final week. “We’ll proceed to be profit-driven till income arrive,” he added.

Regardless of the protests, Reddit isn’t backing down from making the modifications. “We’re not planning any modifications to the API updates we’ve beforehand introduced,” a Reddit spokesperson advised The Guardian. “We spend multimillions of {dollars} on internet hosting charges and Reddit must be pretty paid to proceed supporting high-usage third-party apps.”

Reddit has carved out some exceptions for apps that aren’t monetized and are inside its charge limits, moderator instruments and bots, and accessibility-focused apps, however this has didn’t assuage the issues of protesting moderators.