Reddit protests result in temporary shutdown

June 25th, 2005, this extensive online information website was introduced to the world. Reddit allows users to share their thoughts relating to any subject, in the form of a link, picture, video, or message on their platform. Reddit’s policy has changed lately, introducing a new way of income for the website. Many developers are unable to access its data, resulting in a protest.

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The Reddit Blackout has been taking over the internet for the last couple of days, but what is exactly happening? Reddit’s main revenue stream income lies in the sale of advertising. Besides that, it also offers a premium subscription service offering users a range of exclusive features such as avatar gear, app icons, ad-free browsing, and much more. Both users and developers were able to access the online catalog from anywhere, anytime for free but this changed. A new addition, to the company’s policy, has been implemented. Third-party developers are being charged a certain amount of money in order to access their data, starting from July.

There are different ways to start earning money when hosting a personal community (Subreddit). Once you’ve built your own trustful community, you can sell certain products or services, participate in affiliate programs, and participate in paid surveys. The fact that Reddit is charging these developers money means that either the company isn’t going in the right direction financially or they want to suppress explicit content. Either way, this resulted in a blackout of a total of 3,489 subreddits. Five of the largest communities on the website, r/gaming, r/aww, r/Music, r/todayilearned, and r/pics, (each having more than 30 million people) are included. Reddit’s executive chief, Steve Huffman, reacted: “We respect when you and your communities take action to highlight the things you need, including, at times, going private,” He addresses that the explicit content would be maintained but they would limit the way of access from these third-party apps. The protest was held on Monday, June 12. All of these subreddits went private for 48 hours in disagreement with how the site is being run.

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