Why is Reddit going into 48-hour blackout?

Reddit announced on May 31 that a fee would need to be paid by the third-party application, and in response, the platform's communities have threatened a 48-hour blackout starting on Monday (June 12) citing concerns about going out of business.

Making their posts private prevents visitors from the outside community from seeing them.

The community responded to the announcement by outlining three demands that were centred on Reddit’s application programming interface (API), accessibility for people who are blind, and access to content that is deemed not suitable for work (NSFW).

Established in 2005, Reddit is one of the 20 most popular social media sites.

Additionally, a Reddit post claims that thousands of subreddits, with user counts ranging from 5,000 to more than 40 million, are taking part in the blackout protest.

Forums such as r/todayilearned, r/funny, and r/gaming, with more than 30 million subscribers apiece, have signed up to join, while others with 1 million plus members, including r/iPhone and r/unexpected, went already private on the strike call, Al-Jazeera reported.

It has more than 28,000 moderators and more than 2.6 billion subscribers overall.

The participating subreddits are going private and will not be available during the blackout, according to a BBC report.

The modifications will effectively put an end to well-liked third-party Reddit apps like Apollo, which allow users to browse the site with a customizable interface, by introducing exorbitant fees for "premium access."

According to Christian Selig, Apollo's sole developer, such apps would need to charge about $5 per user per month just to cover the new Reddit fees.

However, there is another reason behind the Reddit dispute: a dispute between the social network and AI firms like OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, who have used vast amounts of data from the service to train their systems.

"The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable," Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, told the New York Times in April. "But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free."

In a group statement, the moderators of the thousands of subreddits that were joining the protest said: "On June 12th, many subreddits will be going dark to protest this policy. Some will return after 48 hours: others will go away permanently unless the issue is adequately addressed since many moderators aren’t able to put in the work they do with the poor tools available through the official app."

The statement also added: "This isn’t something any of us do lightly: we do what we do because we love Reddit, and we truly believe this change will make it impossible to keep doing what we love."

By banding together in this way, moderators hope to put pressure on Reddit's management to take the new charges into consideration and address their concerns.

Moreover, the blackout serves as a reminder of how crucial third-party apps are to improving the Reddit user experience and offering extra features not present in the official app.