Hundreds Of Reddit Gaming Communities Go Private In "Blackout" To Protest Changes

The online world of gaming became a lot smaller over the weekend, as hundreds of game-focused communities on Reddit have gone dark to protest the coming changes to Reddit's API. The subreddits affected include general discussion groups like r/gaming and r/games, as well as more specific game-oriented communities like r/DestinyTheGame, r/NintendoSwitch, and more. Some of these subreddits have gone private, meaning that all of their content is unavailable, while some have merely restricted new posts.

In total, more than 7,000 subreddits have "gone dark" so far, according to live tracker Reddark, including some of the largest communities on the site, including r/funny, r/aww, r/gaming, and r/music. These communities have organized a 48-hour "blackout" from June 12-14, with some communities planning to extend the protest depending on how the site's management reacts. The blackout seemed to cause Reddit to experience significant downtime on Monday, with the site's status page describing it as a "major outage."

The controversy began earlier this month when the developers of the popular third-party Reddit app Apollo and RIF announced that the site's planned API changes would force them to shut down at the end of June, citing high costs and insufficiently short notice. The API changes may also effectively kill many of the site's bots due to the increased cost of API calls, leaving developers to foot the bill. It's unclear how Reddit's management will respond to this campaign. A recent Reuters report suggests that the site is planning to go public later in 2023, which may explain the logic behind the API changes.