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 collectively turned to a gray "Dark" status, which means that the moderators of this forum have temporarily set the forum status to restricted access or private status. 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. In other words, half of Reddit's community management is actually on strike, and their protests directly make half of the content of this North American social giant inaccessible.
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One of Go Dark's communities on Reddit (Reddit)
What happened on Reddit?
Since 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 strike, originally planned for 48 hours, has been extended indefinitely, with many communities opting to keep it private. Strike management claims that the change in API pricing will lead to the demise of third-party applications on Reddit, leaving more contributors in the community (such as moderators and content authors) without the management tools at their fingertips.
At its core, this is aStories of centralized forum companies sacrificing third-party applications and contributors within the community in order to increase their own income. In addition to providing a forum platform, Reddit itself does not provide too many resources for the internal management and collaboration of the forum, 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 need to purchase Reddit's API to access the content and information on Reddit. This time, Reddit chose to raise the price of the API significantly because of the impact on the listing, and the price after the price increase is completely unacceptable to most third-party software. These software may be forced to shut down, which greatly hurts the management efficiency of Reddit moderators and forum managers, and in turn hurts ordinary Reddit users.
Major communities, including r/funny, r/science, r/gaming, and r/aww, took part in the protests, taking a slew of the most popular sub-forums on Reddit offline. 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.
According to CNBC, Jacqueline Sheeran, known on Reddit as "MCHammerCurls," is the main moderator of r/Fitness, a forum with more than 10 million members. 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.
"A lot of people [who come to Reddit looking for answers] have serious 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 without being targeted by bots or spam accounts," she said. 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 the price so that so many forum moderators and third-party developers can't accept it? According to a post on Reddit by Christian Selig, developer of Apollo, a well-known third-party management app, 50 million requests would cost $12,000, a figure that was 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 the new API pricing, Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would bring the monthly fee to about $1.7 million, or $20 million per year. The average Apollo user would pay $2.50 , which is about 20 times more than what Reddit can generate per user.”
He claims that if Reddit doesn't plan to change its pricing plan, Apollo will shut down at the end of the month.
For comparison, Reddit said in 2021 that its quarterly ad revenue hit $100 million for the first time. The company is estimated to have slightly under $1 billion in annual revenue, but is not 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 plans. For now, it is unclear whether the listing will be successful.image description
Community stats for Reddit Go Dark (Reddark)
"No one likes this situation," said moderator Croach. "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 Reddit, and we genuinely feel that not only are these decisions potentially damaging to the future of the site , 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... Most importantly, we want positive, Peaceful outcome, to get everything back to normal."
