This is a website that offers us all kinds of content distributed in what are referred to as subreddits generated and managed by the users themselves. It must be borne in mind that we are facing one of the most popular websites on the entire Internet, both at an informative and leisure level. However, in the last hours an important complaint is spreading that will have certain repercussions.
In fact, to give you an idea, we will tell you that several of the commented subreddits, some very well known, are going to go offline. This is something that will affect hundreds of thousands of users. Let us see the reason why this unpleasant fact is happening. And it is that the creators of some of these independent sections of Reddit plan to temporarily close them as a protest.
Why Reddit is protesting
It must be said that all this is due to the fact that there has been a change in the Reddit API policy that most have not liked. Hence, regular users of the web are going to unsubscribe their subreddits for at least 48 hours. The worst of the case is that there are also those who have made the determination to turn them off for a month, and even permanently until the problem is resolved.
Based on the enormous number of visits to this website and its corresponding sections, this affects a huge number of Internet users. You may be one of those affected and you follow a series of subreddits that suddenly you will not be able to access from the web browser. Specific from June 12 to 13 This protest will take place on Reddit. It is promoted by a major user of the website in response to the portal’s decision with the API. Specifically, all this is due to Reddit’s decision to put a high price on the third-party applications by calling their API.
The worst of all this is not the payment as such for using the API, but the huge amount of money requested. As stated in the protest message, many developers don’t have that money and will make their apps die. It must be said that Reddit wants to charge the developers of these apps, $12,500 for every 50 million requests from your API. To give you an idea of the magnitude of all this, for example, the aforementioned Apollo, which has around 7,000 million requests, so it would have to pay about 20 million dollars for using the API, something unassumable.
To all this we can add the website downsizing. Layoffs have been taking place on Reddit since last year, since they want to reduce 5% of the workforce. Another reason for the complaints of many.
Some subreddits that will disappear
There are third-party apps like Apollo, Reddit Is Fun, and others that rely on Reddit API calls to keep working. However, the protest occurs because its price is not within the reach of the developers of these apps. Hence, some important subreddits will temporarily disappear in protest. Say the web got around 150 million subscribers, which is not little. One of the reasons for all this is related to the Reddit plans to go public. For this you need to have more income, hence this change. Plan this IPO the second half of 2023.
Hence, the proposal could be considered as significant and important. What’s more, this is a proposal that will be extended to other commonly used social platforms. And it is that these third-party applications allow mobile users to access the old Reddit, a still significant part. They can also customize your feeds and use other features. Some of the website’s moderators rely on these third-party features to effectively moderate subreddits.
Among those that are going to disappear temporarily in a few days, we can highlight some very important subreddits like these that we are listing:
- r/aww
- r/gaming
- r/Music
- r/pics
- r/todayilearned
