Over 8,000 Subreddits Have Gone Dark To Protest The Change That Will Kill Third-Party Reddit Apps

Over 8,000 subreddits including mastodons such as /r/funny, /r/gaming and /r/Music are unavailable today and tomorrow as Reddit's userbase is staging a massive protest against its own platform over its controversial decision to raise prices for API access, which will effectively kill popular third-party apps such as Apollo and Reddit is Fun.

Subreddits with a combined subscriber count of 2.7 billion are currently supposed to be on lockdown as Reddit's administration did not budge under vocal demands to revert – or at least adjust – the new policy.

Among participating subreddits that are over 10 million subscribers in size are /r/funny, /r/aww, /r/todayilearned, /r/LifeProTips, /r/mildlyinteresing and many other names familiar to any avid Reddit user.

The two-day blackout was first announced on June 2nd after Reddit revealed its plan two days earlier to charge $12,000 per 50 million requests to its API, a sum which developers of well-known third-party Reddit apps such as Apollo, Reddit Is Fun and Narwhal described as "unreasonable" and "not based in reality."

After a week of negotiation attempts, on June 8th, Christian Selig, the developer of the wildly popular Apollo app, threw in the towel and wrote that the app will be shutting down on June 30th, writing that the "talks with Reddit have deteriorated to an ugly point" and reporting that Reddit accused the app of blackmail and threats (which later turned out to be Reddit overreacting to Selig's "joke" offer to sell Apollo for $10 million).

On the day of the protest, Reddit's CEO Steve "Spez" Huffman then addressed the controversy, doubling down on the pricing change.

Both the initial announcement and the recent communication were met with overwhelming criticisms from Reddit's userbase and beyond it as users demanded that the protester's demands are met and voiced their support for the blackout.

As of 5:15 p.m. EST today, the Reddark website (dedicated to tracking all of the subreddits going private during the protest) reports that there are over 8,080 subreddits currently dark, totaling roughly 96 percent of the entire site.

The blackout will last for 48 hours, although many subreddits are planning to stay locked indefinitely until Reddit adjusts the new policy.