Thousands of popular subreddits went dark for 48 hours on Monday and Tuesday to protest Reddit"s plans to start charging for accessing its APIs starting July 1. Today that protest was scheduled to end, but many of those subreddits are continuing to stay "dark".
Those subreddits that have remained dark include many in the Microsoft Windows community. The r/windows, r/Windows10, r/Windows11 r/MicrosoftTeams, r/windowsinsiders, and r/WindowsHelp subreddits are all still inaccessible as of this writing. The number of people who are members of these communities are in the hundreds of thousands. There"s no word on when these subreddits will end their API price hike protest.
The reason for all these forums to basically shut down is due to Reddit"s current plan to raise the prices of its APIs that are used by many third-party apps and services. This decision was the reason why a number of popular third-party Reddit apps like Apollo and Reddit is Fun will shut down on June 30, because they claim they won"t be able to afford to access Reddit"s API files after that date.
On Monday, the first day of the official protest, Reddit experienced some lengthy outages due in part to so many subreddits going dark. However, the leadership of the online forum is still sticking to its guns in terms of its planned price hikes.
In a leaked memo sent to the company"s employees later on Monday, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman claimed that the event did not have "any significant revenue impact so far."
If enough popular subreddits remain dark for a longer period of time, that could indeed have consequences for Reddit"s revenues in the long term. However, it"s also possible that those same subreddits might have to come back online at some point to keep their communities going. It"s basically a game of chicken, and we will see which side will flinch first.