History of the question

Reddit is a popular English-speaking Internet platform for posting pictures, links or texts, as well as discussing them. At the same time, it is rather difficult to assign it to one category: Reddit partly resembles a blog platform (you can mention communities in Live magazine), partly a forum (posts are grouped by thematic sections (subreddits), headed by moderators), a service for publishing pictures and memes, a social network: the user forms a feed from the communities he is interested in, and then it will be trimmed in the same way.

Reddit is primarily accessed through the mobile app, which has twice as many users as those accessing it through a browser. At the same time, the official MP Reddit is such a coffin on wheels, an inconvenient and buggy monster, the subject of constant criticism from users. At the same time, from the very beginning, Reddit gave free access to its functionality through an API. The combination of these two factors led to the emergence of dozens alternative mobile applications – Apollo, RIF, Boost and many others. All of them provide either free access with ads, or for a small fee of about $5-10 per year.

It is important that Reddit itself was completely satisfied with this, and it did not affect the financial indicators in any way. I assume that the scheme here is roughly the same as in free2play games: just as it is critical for the game to have a mass of gamers who do not seem to bring direct income (without them, donors simply have no one to play with and no one to show their coolness to). For Reddit, it’s important to show advertisers the overall user base and generally increase engagement.

Conflict

Reddit announced the future introduction of API access fees back in April. However, specific tariffs were not announced. Information about them appeared only at the end of May, and it was a shock: the price tag turned out to be prohibitive: the goal is obviously not to make a profit, but to completely disconnect alternative customers. The author of Apollo, for example, gives the following figures: for 50 million requests to the Imgur API, he pays $ 166, while Reddit requires two orders of magnitude more for the same number of requests – 12 thousand!

The news immediately spread across the Internet, got to the main page of Hacker News and, of course, caused heated discussions on Reddit itself.

N.B Separately users were incensed that it would be impossible to access content marked as NSFW through the API, even for money. The term stands for Not Safe For Work and is a euphemism for 1% dismemberment and 99% exposure of various degrees of severity.

Strike

Quite quickly, users organized themselves, created a community to oppose future innovations, and began to prepare for a strike. The coordination center of the resistance movement has become a subreddit for the communication of moderators /r/ModCoord. Blackout was chosen as the method of protest: the departure of communities into private mode, in which current users have access, but the rest of the posts cease to be visible (see, for example, /r/TIHI), including through the feed.

The strike will begin on Monday, June 12th, and will continue for either 24 hours, 48 ​​hours, or indefinitely, at the discretion of each subreddit’s moderators. At the same time, some sections have already gone into private mode.

N.BCommenters on Reddit traditionally love to play with words and meaning, and the addition of communities such as /r/QuitYourBullshit (stop putting noodles in my ears!) and r/TIHI (thanks, that’s disgusting!) has been met with particular enthusiasm..

The list of communities that joined the strike is quite long. It features half of the top ten subreddits:

and many smaller sections. I’m looking forward to Monday to check out Reddit’s top overall feed, the /r/all thread, during the blackout.

Forecast

The result of these actions is quite difficult to predict. First, it is difficult to assess the impact of a strike, in which a significant, but by no means overwhelming, number of sections participates. Second, as one comment pointed out, Reddit owns Reddit. If anything, a wayward moderator can be changed to a more compliant one – say, if the strike in some section is indefinite.

As a user of an alternative client, of course I want the users to win. But, unfortunately, most likely you will have to say goodbye to free clients in any case: even if Reddit lowers the price by two orders of magnitude, you will still have to pay, and advertising revenue is unlikely to cover access to the API.

Regardless of the outcome, this case will go down in history as one of the biggest confrontations between an Internet service and its users.