In fact, Reddit is now largely blacked out by protest

Reddit is a lot less fun these days. The forum that is divided into all kinds of different channels suddenly has a lot less of those sub-channels. At least that’s probably temporary. Many a subreddit, as such a channel is called, is black. It’s not your fault: you’re still welcome, but not right now.

Subreddits on black

That’s because subreddits are protesting the plans formed at Reddit about using APIs and other new policies. The APIs, which allow you to use Reddit in your app as a third party, have become so expensive that many third parties have had to stop using their app. Sad, because many apps are also used extensively. Anyone who has ever been fond of a forum knows it: you are sometimes extremely active and want to spend a lot of time on it and many people did that via an app that was built outside of Reddit, but can read Reddit.

That doesn’t work so well anymore, among others, the immensely popular Apollo has said that it will stop now that Reddit has rather unrealistic payment options. To show that not only the creators of those apps are not okay with it, but also users, many moderators have closed their channel. Thousands of subreddits are down, including some very prominent ones. Think for example of r/gaming and r/android, but also r/funny, a Reddit where people come for pure entertainment.

Reddit doesn’t budge

Some subreddits will still be closed for a few days, others have vowed not to open again until Reddit changes its policy. Spicy. And double: on the one hand, there is now extra attention for Reddit, so it will not really notice it in the number of visitors, but on the other hand, they will of course not stick. And the more days it takes… But yes, CEO Steve Huffman has already said that this is the new way Reddit works and that’s it. Well, whether that lasts as long as we’ve got so many subreddits locked, we’ll see.

In the meantime we also see another movement; people are suddenly going to reddit on Discord. Something that doesn’t make everyone happy, because that’s not what Discord is for. Well, if the shoe fits…Reddit has been trying to be Discord for a while now.