• Many sub-Reddits are taking part in a protest by switching to private mode so the majority of users can’t access them.
• This is in protest of proposed API changes which have caused many third-party Reddit applications to announce they are shutting down.
• Some communities including r/Music have announced they are going private indefinitely.

Starting today, some of the biggest communities on Reddit will switch to private mode in protest of forthcoming changes to the platform’s application programming interface (API).

Back in April, Reddit announced that it would start charging for API access. The exact charge for access to the once free API is an unknown quantity. At least it was until Christian Selig who works on the Apollo app – a Reddit app for iOS – revealed that it would cost him $20 million a year to access Reddit’s API.

“I’ll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12 000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined,” Selig wrote on Reddit in May.

“Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I’d be in the red every month,” the developer added.

This API pricing has now forced Apollo and other third party Reddit apps including Sync, Reddplant and RIF to announce they are shutting up shop.

All of this has lead to widespread criticism of Reddit and its chief executive officer Steve Huffman. That criticism has culminated in a number of sub-Reddits announcing they will switch to private mode for 48 hours. This means that the communities will be inaccessible for most users for this time. The exact number of sub-Reddits that will go dark is in the thousands but we don’t have an exact figure as of time of writing.

A quick look at sub-Reddits we frequent reveal that r/Music, r/science, r/Dota2, r/DestinyTheGame, r/Gaming and even r/TaylorSwift have gone private or plan to do so later today.

In the case of r/Music, the community states it is “Closed Indefinitely for Reddit API Policy Change Protest”. While Reddit is made up of thousands of niche communities, this protest from some of the bigger communities could hurt Reddit’s traffic which is estimated to be 52 million users every day.

We suspect many communities were spurred to participate after Huffman hosted an Ask Me Anything last week.

That event saw Huffman being pummelled with constant unrelenting criticism about the API decision and a very public fight between himself and Selig. That situation is about as messy as a university student’s room in the middle of finals but TechCrunch has summarised it here.

The CEO made it clear that the platform will be driven to make a profit until it is profitable. While we understand that running a website as large and popular as Reddit costs money, it’s a hard truth to hear from a website built around the idea of open and welcoming communities.

The API changes came amidst the rise in popularity of ChatGPT which was trained using the internet and the so-called front page of the internet was likely among that corpus of data.

As such, we don’t expect the API policy to evolve in any way from its current form. While the blackout from massive communities could make an impact we’ll only know how effective it was once it’s over.