Subsections – called subreddits – of the popular social forum Reddit have staged a blackout to protest the company’s new policy to charge third-party developers for access to the site’s Application Programming Interface (API).

Reddit – the self-proclaimed front page of the internet – has been a free-to-use website with thousands of subreddits focused on various themes and topics, ranging from general news to special interests and even explicit content.

While the site has some paid moderators, it mainly relies on community moderators to audit site content of the subreddits to keep them to theme and prevent spam and abuse.

The site was first developed in 2005, but an official mobile app was not released until 2016. Before this, third-party developers created apps which could access Reddit content by using the free API. Apps like Apollo, RedditisFun, and Narwhal popped up with thousands of Reddit users – called Redditors – downloading the app to access site content on their mobile devices.

Many moderators rely on these third-party apps to better manage their subreddits, which they do on a volunteer basis.

Recently, however, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has said the site aims to ‘break even’ this year by charging for the use of its API by third parties – the company has also laid off about 5% of their workforce in a bid to ‘restructure’.

The policy has now come into affect, with some of the most popular subreddits taking a stand by going private – around 3,500 will be inaccessible for the 48-hour blackout, according to the BBC.

Some of the top pages going private will include R/pics, R/aww, and R/todayilearned.

So far, Reddit would charge only third-party apps that have over 100 queries per minute – this would mean only about 10% of apps would face charges.

Third-party developers that would be affected, however, have said the rates for API usage – at $0.24 for every 1,000 queries – are ‘extortionate’ and they would have to close down their apps as a result.

Christian Selig, the developer behind the Apollo app, a third-party application moderators often turn to for its extra features, said the new charges would cost his company $20 million a year based on their average traffic.

The shutdown of third-party apps may be a casualty of the new policy rather than a purposeful outcome – the announcement came just as multiple major tech companies announced their intentions to invest heavily in Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities, particularly large language models like ChatGPT.

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These models use data scraped from the internet, including freely available APIs. Reddit said that “as a platform with one of the largest corpus of human-to-human conversations online, spanning the past 18 years, we have an obligation to our communities to be stewards of this content.”

Forums on the site hold millions of conversations which AI models could use to train on, and Reddit is saying the move to charge developers would be a way of protecting this data.

In a statement posted on Reddit the Friday before the blackout, Steve Hoffman addressed the moderators: “We respect when you and your communities take action to highlight the things you need, including, at times, going private.”