The turmoil and consequences of the centralized community: Reddit community protests in progress

In the past week, thousands of sub-forums on the North American social forum; Reddit; have been grayed out "Dark" status, which means that the moderator of this forum has temporarily set the forum status to restricted access or private state. In this state, ordinary users cannot access any content in this forum. As of June; 18;, nearly half (3933/8829;, from; reddark; website data) of the forums still choose to maintain the "Dark" status. That is to say, Reddit; in fact, half of the community management is on strike, and their protest directly makes half of the content of this North American social giant inaccessible.

Imagine that in the heyday of Baidu Post Bar around 2012, half of the Post Bars were directly closed by the bar owners because of a protest movement, and ordinary users could not access them at all. What kind of scene would this be? At this moment, such a movement is actually happening on the "Baidu Tieba on the other side of the ocean".

Reddit; on; Go Dark; one of the communities (Reddit)

What happened on Reddit;

**As of last week, thousands of subforums on Reddit; have launched a "Go Dark" campaign to temporarily close their community doors in protest of the platform's recent changes to; API; pricing. **The originally planned ;48;hour strike has been extended indefinitely, with many communities opting to keep it private. Strike management claims that API; pricing changes will lead to the demise of third-party applications on Reddit, leaving more contributors in the community (such as moderators and content authors) without handy management tools.

At its core, this is a story of a centralized forum company sacrificing third-party applications and contributors within the community in order to increase its own income. Reddit itself does not provide too many resources for internal management and collaboration in addition to providing a forum platform, so most of the large forum moderators (some forums have more than 10 million participants) rely on external Third-party software to manage content and participants on the forum. These third-party software require the purchase of;Reddit;'s;API;in order to access the content and information on;Reddit;. This time, Reddit; because of the impact on the listing, chose to raise the price of API; and the price after the price increase is completely unacceptable for most third-party software. These software may be forced to shut down, which greatly hurts;Reddit;moderators and forum management efficiency, which in turn hurts;Reddit;regular users.

Major communities, including; r/funny, r/science, r/gaming; and; r/aww, were involved in protests that resulted in the removal of a large number of the most popular sub-forums on; Reddit; These sub-forums include millions of subscribers and represent a large portion of the platform's user base. Some subforums are considering closing down permanently unless their grievances are adequately addressed.

Jacqueline Sheeran, better known as "MCHammers" on;Reddit;, is the main moderator of;r/Fitness;, a forum with more than;10 million;members, according to;CNBC;. Volunteer moderators rely on third-party apps to implement various security features to flag keywords, phrases and expressions, she said. And these features are very important in health-related forums.

She said: "A lot of people (who come to; Reddit; looking for answers) have significant health issues, like eating disorders and sprains... We're trying to make sure that people can stay safe and healthy while they're doing activities, while being free from robots or trash. Account interference.” And these functions need to rely on third-party software and developers to be able to achieve. If these people are forced to shut down their software, the consequences could be more than a few forums down and tools disappearing.

Centralization, price increases and protests

How much did Reddit raise its price so that so many forum moderators and third-party developers couldn't accept it? According to a post by Christian Selig, the developer of Apollo, a well-known third-party management application on Reddit, 5,000; million requests cost $12,000, which is far from acceptable to him. For comparison, the same amount of requests on Imgur (Reddit's main competitor) cost only $166.

Selig; said, "Based on new; API; pricing, Apollo; launched; last month; 7 billion; ;average user fee will be $2.5;which is about;20;times higher than what each user can bring to;Reddit;.

He claims that eg; Reddit; does not intend to change pricing plans, Apollo; will shut down at the end of the month.

For comparison, Reddit; in; 2021; said its quarterly advertising revenue reached; $100 million for the first time. The company is estimated to have slightly under $1 billion in annual revenue, but is not yet profitable. Reddit secretly submitted its listing application at the end of 2021, but the subsequent end of the bull market and the arrival of the bear market have greatly affected its listing plan. For now, it is unclear whether the listing will be successful. **Many people associate the listing application with this price increase, thinking that;Reddit;is still attacking the listing by increasing revenue, and this large-scale protest undoubtedly interrupted;Reddit ; the ambition to raise prices. **

Reddit Go Dark; community stats (Reddark)

"Nobody likes this situation," moderator;Croach; said. "No one wants to shut down the site. No one is ecstatic about it. No one is happy about it. We do it because...we love everything about; cause damage, and these decisions are simply unfair to the many people (including third-party developers) who have volunteered their time to the site over the years... and most importantly, we want it to happen as soon as possible A positive, peaceful outcome to get everything back to normal."