Unrest and Consequences of Centralized Communities: Reddit Protests in Progress

Reddit Protests: Unrest and Consequences

Half of the community management went on strike to protest raising prices for going public.

Author: jk

Last week, thousands of sub-forums on the North American social forum Reddit turned gray, indicating that the forum administrator temporarily set the forum status to restricted access or private status. In this state, ordinary users cannot access any content in this forum. As of June 18, nearly half (3933/8829, according to data from reddark website) of the forums choose to remain in Dark mode. In other words, half of Reddit’s community management is on strike, and their protests have made half of the content of this North American social giant inaccessible.

Imagine a scene where half of the Tieba forums, which were at their peak in around 2012, were directly closed due to a protest movement, and ordinary users could not access them at all. Right now, such a movement is happening on the “Baidu Tieba across the ocean”.

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One of the communities on Reddit that went dark (Reddit)

What happened on Reddit?

Since last week, thousands of sub-forums on Reddit have launched a “Go Dark” movement, temporarily closing their community doors in protest of recent changes in API pricing on the platform. The initial plan for the 48-hour strike has been indefinitely extended, and many communities have opted to remain private. The strike management claimed that the change in API pricing would cause third-party apps on Reddit to disappear, leaving more contributors (such as moderators and content authors) without suitable management tools available within the communities.

At its core, this is a story of a centralized forum company sacrificing third-party applications and contributors within the community to increase its own revenue. Reddit itself has not provided many resources for managing and collaborating within the forum beyond the forum platform, so most of the major forum moderators (some forums have more than 10 million participants) rely on third-party software outside of Reddit to manage forum content and participants. These third-party software require the purchase of Reddit’s API to access content and information on Reddit. This time, Reddit chose to raise the API prices significantly for the sake of going public, and the post-price is completely unacceptable for the vast majority of third-party software. These software may be forced to close, greatly harming the management efficiency of Reddit moderators and forum managers, and thus hurting Reddit’s ordinary users.

Major communities, including r/funny, r/science, r/gaming, and r/aww, participated in protests that resulted in a large number of the most popular subreddits going offline. These subreddits included millions of subscribers, making up a significant portion of the platform’s user base. Some subreddits are considering permanent closure unless their demands are fully addressed.

According to CNBC, Jacqueline Sheeran, better known on Reddit as “MCHammerCurls,” is the primary moderator of r/Fitness, which has over 10 million members. She stated that volunteer moderators rely on third-party applications to implement various security features in order to flag keywords, phrases, and expressions. These features are particularly important on health-related forums.

She said, “A lot of [people who come to Reddit seeking answers] have important health issues, such as eating disorders and sprains… We’re trying to ensure people can stay safe and healthy while participating in activities without interference from bots or spam accounts.” And these features require third-party software and developers to implement. The consequences of forcing these people to shut down their software may be more than just the closure of a few forums and the disappearance of tools.

Centralization, Price Hikes, and Protests

Just how much did Reddit increase its prices to make so many forum managers and third-party developers unable to accept it? According to a post by Christian Selig, the developer of the famous third-party management app Apollo on Reddit, 50 million requests cost $12,000, a number that he cannot accept. By comparison, the same number of requests on Imgur (Reddit’s main competitor) costs only $166.

Selig said, “With the new API pricing, Apollo launched 7 billion requests last month, which will make the monthly cost around $1.7 million or $20 million a year. The average cost per Apollo user will be $2.5, which is about 20 times higher than the revenue each user can bring to Reddit.”

He claimed that if Reddit does not intend to change its pricing plan, Apollo will be shut down at the end of the month.

By comparison, Reddit reported in 2021 that its quarterly advertising revenue reached $100 million for the first time. The company’s annual revenue is estimated to be slightly less than $1 billion, but it is not profitable. Reddit secretly submitted an IPO application at the end of 2021, but the subsequent end of the bull market and the arrival of the bear market greatly affected its IPO plans. As of now, it is unclear whether the IPO will be successful. Many people associate the IPO application with this price increase, believing that Reddit is still pushing for an IPO by increasing revenue, and this massive protest undoubtedly interrupted Reddit’s ambition to raise prices.

Community statistics of Reddit Go Dark (Reddark)

“Nobody likes this situation,” said moderator Croach. “Nobody wants to shut down the site. Nobody is happy about this. We are doing this because… we love all aspects of Reddit, and we sincerely feel that these decisions are not only potentially damaging to the future of the site, but also unfair to many people (including third-party developers) who have volunteered their time to contribute to the site over the years… Most importantly, we want to achieve a positive, peaceful resolution as soon as possible and get everything back to normal.”

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