Four days after the blackout protest, Reddit has announced that most of its communities are back to their normal operations. According to the company, 80 percent of its top subreddits are now open. This announcement comes after thousands of online forums shut down in protest over Reddit’s decision to raise its fees.
The website Reddark, which tracked the blackout on the site, reported on Thursday that over 5,000 subreddits were still limiting access to their content. However, this was lower than the initial pledge of almost 9,000 forums that were set to go dark for at least two days starting on June 12.
Developer Protests
The blackout came as a result of Reddit’s decision to start charging for access to its application programming interface (API). This move would force developers to pay Reddit $20 million a year for their apps to continue operating under the new pricing policy. One developer of a popular app, Apollo, announced that they would be shutting down on June 30, a day before Reddit’s pricing change takes effect.
Reddit has since defended its decision to charge its biggest users, stating that the fees it would charge developers were in line with its own costs. The company also responded to concerns over the fate of accessibility-focused apps, saying that certain apps would be exempt from the new charges.
In Thursday’s blog post, Reddit stated that 98 percent of third-party apps would not have to pay anything under the new fee structure. The company expressed that “mods and users want communities to be open and accessible,” and after hearing their concerns, “many communities have decided to reopen.”
Despite the protests, Reddit remains one of the most popular websites in the world, with over 330 million monthly active users. The site is known for its user-generated content, which ranges from news to memes to discussions on a wide range of topics. With the majority of its top subreddits now back up and running, it seems that Reddit’s communities are returning to their normal state.
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