Reddit released some new stats amid the ongoing mass protest, dubbed Reddit Blackout 2023, against its recent API pricing. The company says it has 100,000+ active communities and more than 80% of its top 5,000 communities (by daily unique visitors) are open as of now.
The social networking platform also revealed that it"s frequented by over 57 million daily unique visitors and over 50,000 daily active mods.
Earlier this week, a 48-hour blackout was organized by thousands of subreddits from June 12 through June 14. The subreddits that joined the protest included the ones with a follower count upwards of 30 million and even 40 million users. While some communities were back to public mode on Wednesday, the blackout is going on as around 5,000 subreddits are still dark, according to one tracker.
As per previous reports, Reddit"s new API pricing made it unaffordable for third-party developers to run their apps. Popular Reddit apps Apollo, Sync, and Reddit is Fun have announced they will shut down on June 30. The updated pricing will come into effect on July 1 and third-party apps that require higher usage will have to pay $0.24 per 1,000 API calls.
On the flip side, Reddit remains firm on its previous decision while it waits for the heat to cool off. "We are not shutting down discussions or unilaterally reopening communities," Reddit wrote in its API Fact Sheet. However, the company cited its Moderator Code of Conduct in a separate post and said it will "add new, active mods to the subreddits" if rules are broken.
If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod who wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told The Verge in an interview that the platform "was never designed to support third-party apps."
"We let it exist. And I should take the blame for that, because I was the guy arguing for that for a long time. But I didn’t know — and this is my fault — the extent that they were profiting off of our API. That these were not charities."
"Not as much as they take. No way," Huffman said when asked whether Apollo, RIF, and Sync add value to Reddit.