Reddit and the Common User

In the past, we’ve seen social media users connect online and take affirmative action in the real world through protests and other such activities. This time, both the protest and the protestors remained online as Reddit, often described as the ‘front page of the internet’ ended up making front-page news, specifically in the United States. 

Many of the platform’s largest forums or subreddits as they’re known stopped users from viewing their site or posting on them as a mark of protest against Reddit’s decision to change its policies around third-party apps to access its content. A move that is likely to drive third-party developers of the applications out of business. 

Several communities go dark on Reddit

Some of the largest forums including r/pics, r/gaming and r/music went off the radar for its users as several joined the protest against policy changes that are scheduled to take effect from the first of July. Reddit would now charge external applications for accessing its content, one that was free till date. 

Several subreddits joined the protest that began from the United States. In fact, a report published on TechCrunch said the website itself went down, having first experienced outages early in the morning EDT. Though early reports on the Reddit Status page showed all systems to be operational, later it was updated to reflect the outage. 

The impact would be visible now in India

Late in the evening, when some of our team members attempted to load the site, the feed displays read “Something went wrong. Just don’t panic” while in some cases we received a pop-up alert that said “Sorry, we couldn’t load posts on this page.” In fact, things were tougher on the Reddit mobile app.  

The company, which appeared to be aware of the content loading issue, did not identify the cause for most of the evening. However, reports this morning indicated that Reddit had confirmed the outage and pointed it to the planned protest by the communities suddenly going private on the network. 

In fact, TechCrunch quoted Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt to suggest that several subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and that the company was working on resolving the anticipated issue. Early this morning, we saw several users taking to Twitter to report the outage. 

Protestors protest against API pricing

These protests had been planned for some days now over the company’s API pricing policy that would increase the cost for developers to a point where those operating third-party apps on Reddit would have to shut down. Not too many who were protesting appeared to take the words of Reddit CEO Steve Huffman who resorted to an Ask Me Anything (AMA) forum on his page. 

Huffman appeared to be explaining his own motives for changing the policy but refrained from making any commitment on reconsidering the same in spite of the community anger. In fact, when he specifically pointed to a popular third-party app Apollo’s developer for bad behavior things just went further south. 

While thousands of subreddits went dark for the whole day, others such as r/iPhone announced that they would go beyond the planned 48 hours and remain private indefinitely. In other words, only moderators and approved submitters would be able to see the front page of this community while others could just see a message about them turning private.