It took less than 11 hours for Reddit to feel the impact of widespread protests against its API charges. More than 7,000 subreddits went private to “go dark” and resist Reddit’s controversial API price hike, which caused some instability for the site, and it was about 10:25 a.m. ET Unpleasant 1:26 PM Today.
During the outage, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt told The Verge:
A significant number of subreddits going private caused some expected stability issues and we’ve been working to fix the expected issue.
At the time of writing, 7,856 subreddits have joined the protest, according to a counter on Twitch, and 8,191 have said they will. Some of the subreddits that are disappearing have tens of millions of subscribers. But with the outage, the protests have already affected users who do not use a protest subreddit.
During the outage, I couldn’t use the Reddit site, which showed a main feed saying, “Something went wrong. Don’t panic” and a popup saying, “Sorry, we couldn’t load posts for this page.” TechCrunch reported that users were also unable to view threads on the Reddit app. According to The Verge, “some” subreddits were loaded during this time. There were 45,887 reports of outages at the peak of the problem, per Downdetector.
Thousands of subreddits banded together to go private or read-only from June 12 (though some started their protests earlier, and some say they will protest indefinitely) through June 14 to rebel against how much Reddit will ask for access the API, which used are free. Some believe the changes announced in April are a deliberate death knell for third-party Reddit apps, similar to how Twitter virtually eliminated third-party apps with its API price hike in February.
iOS app Apollo, which sparked controversy when it said it would have to pay $20 million a year for the new pricing scheme to keep operating, said it would close on June 30. Apollo is Reddit’s most popular third-party app, and it’s not the only one preparing for the end.
And while the three-hour outage may feel like a win for the little guy, Reddit has yet to show any signs of relenting.
In an awkward Q&A on the issue Friday ahead of the protests, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman was adamant about pricing, saying in his first post that “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining company, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data usage.”
“We will remain profit-oriented until profit comes. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable,” Huffman replied when asked about concerns “that Reddit is becoming more profit-oriented and less focused on community engagement .”
Reddit gives a free pass to apps that “meet accessibility needs,” Rathschmidt told The Verge last week, and some, like RedReader and Dystopia, confirmed to receive waivers.
But beyond that, Reddit has insisted it must be “reasonably paid” to support third-party apps. The company appears to be looking for cash, including layoffs and hiring freezes last week. Reddit has filed for an IPO in late 2021, and The Information reported in February that it wants to go public this year.
Reddit denied it was making any efforts to take down third-party apps, but skepticism remains, especially given the pricing schedule. Reddit charges $0.24 per 1,000 requests or $12,000 for 50 million. For comparison, Imgur charges $500 per month for 7.5 million requests per month or $10,000 per month for 150 million requests per month, and Twitter charges $42,000 for 50 million tweets.
Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent company Condé Nast, is Reddit’s largest shareholder.
