You may have noticed that many Reddit communities have shut down (temporarily) today and that's down to numerous subreddits (more than 6,000) shifting to private status in protest against the changes being made to the company's API. These changes follow in the footsteps of Twitter in that third-party apps now have to pay Reddit in order to access its API. As it would happen, the protest coincided with the platform suffering a major outage across its desktop and mobile apps and websites.
The decision to start charging for access to its API has meant that popular third-party apps such as Apollo and RIF have announced they will shut down on June 30th. Apollo's creator, Christian Selig, said the reason for shutting down is that access to Twitter's API would cost in the region of $20 million per annum, a sum of revenue that the app is obviously not generating.
According to a statement given to Engadget, Reddit experienced the stability issues because of a “significant number” of subreddits changing to private status. While some subreddits have commited to 48 hours shutdowns some are going as far to going dark until Reddit reverses its decision to charge for API access.
Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman, stated that the company would “continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive” and that the company did not plan to change policy.
Besides the API charges, the shutdown is also down to the loss of moderation and accessibility features that are only available on the third-party apps.
Without its users and subreddits, what exactly is Reddit? Let us know your thoughts on the shutdown in the comments below.
