Reddit blackout locks out millions of users as subreddits goes dark

Millions of users are being impacted around the world as hugely popular Reddit communities go into open revolt.

Reddit, the social media site known as the “front page of the internet” is in open revolt.

The so-called Reddit “blackout” started yesterday as subreddits protest new fees to use the Reddit Application Programming Interface (API).

The change essentially means Reddit will charge developers of third-party programs. The makers of popular apps Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Sync and ReddPlanet have announced they will shut down due to the new pricing.

Reddit’s API is used by members of its vast online community that have built their own apps to access the platform.

Because of the new fees for accessing Reddit data, these usages will become too expensive for many third-party apps, which triggered the protest.

Many of the site’s biggest communities have gone private and are expected to remain so for at least 48 hours as part of the protest.

Subreddits impacted include r/Music, r/funny, r/gadgets and r/todayilearned — each of which has millions of followers.

There have also been major outages — which have been blamed on the blackout.

At one point on Monday, more than 45,000 outages were reported on the Downdetector website, with Reddit struggling to cope with the unprecedented shutdowns.

The hugely popular discussion platform suffered a major outage on Monday.

Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman.

The row is the latest fallout in the recent artificial intelligence revolution, with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman unwilling to allow companies that build AI chatbots like ChatGPT to have free access to the site to perfect their large-language models.

AI companies have used the free availability of something called an API that is used by developers to build their own versions or have access to the data of another platform.

Through APIs, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard use massive amounts of data from sites such as Reddit in order to refine the human-like content they churn out with impressive results.

An image posted to r/pics. Picture: Reddit

The blackout is taking place on Reddit, locking out millions of users. Picture: Reddit

Elon Musk-owned Twitter has also stopped allowing developers and third-party websites to access the platform’s API for free, in an effort to boost revenues at the struggling business.

“Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidise commercial entities that require large-scale data use,” Mr Huffman wrote in a Reddit post on Friday.

Moderators of many subreddit chat rooms shut them down, and this caused the whole site to sputter badly for a few hours.

According to a group supporting the protest on the site Twitch, more than 7000 groups had gone dark to oppose Reddit’s new fees.

Later on Monday, Reddit posted that it was “observing improvements across the site and expect issue to recover for most users.

- with AFP