More from Reddit protest updates: news on the apps shutting down and Reddit’s fights with mods
The Reddit blackout rages on, so we spent some time with Apollo developer Christian Selig figuring out why. Plus, is Threads the future of Instagram? And is a 15-inch MacBook Air the one we’ve all been waiting for?
That’s the message from the reddark_247 Twitch stream, which shows a live count of which subreddits have gone dark to protest Reddit’s new API rules. Many communities are planning to extend their blackouts past the original Wednesday end date.
8,838 have pledged to do so. Though I have to wonder if these numbers are about to grow.
ICYMI, the company laid off about 90 staffers as part of a goal to break even next year, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month. In his widely-disliked AMA on Friday, CEO Steve Huffman said that the company will “continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive” — it seems that the layoffs and the third-party API pricing changes are part of that mission.
‘Reddit has plugged its ears and refuses to listen to anybody but themselves. And I think there’s some very minor concessions that they can make to make people a lot happier.’
I’m signing off for the day, but I wanted to share the latest count of subreddits that are going private to protest Reddit’s API changes. 8,304 subreddits have pledged to do so, according to a live tracker.
The subreddit blackouts are expected to last until June 14th.
And you might not know that AI is at the heart of it.
Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge that an experiment preventing users from logging in to Reddit’s mobile website is done. A Reddit admin confirmed the test a month ago after a Redditor said they couldn’t login to the mobile site on iOS.
Things have switched from “major outage” to “operational” on Reddit’s status dashboard, and a new message indicates things are getting better. “We’re observing improvements across the site and expect issue to recover for most users,” Reddit wrote. “We will continue to closely monitor the situation.”
Here’s our story about the outage.
The Reddark tracker that Wes posted about yesterday got too much traffic, so now you can watch the count go up in real time on Twitch. If you have the stream open, it plays a sound every time a subreddit goes dark — and over the past 15 minutes or so I’ve had the tab open, I’ve heard that sound a lot.
That’s according to Tim Rathschmidt in an email to me on Sunday, at least. He says the company has nothing to share besides CEO Steve Huffman’s responses in his Friday AMA (which haven’t gone over so well with Redditors).
Thousands of subreddits are planning to go dark on Monday. The most recent count I’ve seen exceeds 5,500.
A new website called Reddark has a list of subreddits (with their subscriber counts) going dark to protest Reddit’s recent API pricing changes that prompted third-party Reddit apps like Apollo to announce they’re shutting down.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman hosted an AMA yesterday about the changes, and it went as well as you could expect.
So far, 160 subreddits have gone dark.
[reddark.untone.uk]
The Reddit co-founder posted what sure reads like a subtweet just a few hours after fellow co-founder and current Reddit CEO Steve Huffman wrapped up his poorly-received AMA. Harsh.
A few subreddits, like r/TIHI and r/polls, went private on Friday ahead of the mass platform protest that’s set to start on Monday. A mod for r/polls cited CEO Steve Huffman’s AMA as the reason for going dark early.
Thousands of subreddits are expected to participate in the protest — the latest count I’ve seen is 3,589.