The Reddit protests against API pricing continue a week after they began. Instead of subreddits that are no longer accessible, there are now countless pictures of the British comedian John Oliver. With the changed tactics, some particularly large subreddits have responded to platform operators’ threats to dismiss protesting moderators.
Previously, Huffman had also referred to the new Twitter boss Elon Musk as a role model for his actions. The managing director not only assured that the criticized plans for pricing API access should be adhered to, but also fundamentally criticized the moderators responsible for the individual subreddits.
This did not go down well with many of the moderators who run the subreddits voluntarily and free of charge, remove spam and generally have a decisive influence on the atmosphere. Because Reddit had suggested that by blocking their subreddits from public view, moderators would go against the will of the community in question and could lose their posts as a result, some have switched tactics.
Several subreddits, each with over 20 million participants, asked over the weekend whether they should go back to normal or only allow pictures of John Oliver in protest. By a huge margin, large majorities voted for the latter, and so the popular subreddits for images, gifs, cute pics, and art are now being flooded with photos or depictions of John Oliver. The Last Week Tonight host called it “excellent work” and provided pictures himself.
The protests were triggered by Reddit’s announcement that it would be ready to charge for API access from July. However, third-party applications rely on the API, and due to the high costs involved and the particularly short notice of pricing, most are discontinuing the service. Above all, this makes it difficult for the mods to moderate the communities because many tools that are helpful for this are not available in the official app.
A week ago, most of the subreddits were switched to non-public in protest, currently around 3800 of 8800 subreddits are still participating in the blackout. The change of tactics to r/aww & Co. shows that there is no end in sight to the resistance.
As part of a real interview tour on Friday, Huffman also drew further criticism with statements about Elon Musk. The US billionaire took over Twitter in the fall, laid off most of the workforce, caused some downright chaos on the platform and reduced the overall value of the short message service by two-thirds within a few months. Despite this, Huffman described him as a role model to NBC News.
While the Twitter takeover in autumn triggered immense growth in the Twitter alternative Mastodon in the so-called Fediverse, a similar development can currently be observed with the Reddit alternatives Lemmy and kbin available there. At the beginning of June they totaled around 50,000 users, and now there are almost 220,000. In terms of monthly active users, the two are only behind Mastodon in 2nd and 3rd place in Fediverse. For German speakers there are the Lemmy instances Feddit and tchncs, internationally such as Beehaw, for kbin such as kbin.social. Because of the rush, it is currently always slower there.
