BLACKOUT

Reddit Communities ‘Go Dark’ to Protest Company’s New Developer Fees

One developer said the site’s new API charges would cost him up to $20 million per year.

Redditors are livid after the site recently announced that it will be charging thousands of dollars for access to its application programming interface (API), which allows developers to access the data needed to create third-party applications. As a result, more than 7,000 communities are going private in a planned two-day protest. Some developers say the change will force them to shut down—Christian Selig, who developed Reddit client app Apollo, said the site’s new API charges would cost him up to $20 million per year, and that he would be pulling the plug on Apollo as a result. “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use,” said Reddit CEO Steve Huffman in a post Friday. Reddit is set to start charging for API access on July 1.