Key Points
- Thousands of Reddit communities have 'gone dark' this week to protest against how the site is being managed.
- The 'blackout' came after Reddit proposed charging developers of third-party applications.
- While some communities said their protests would last for 48 hours, others said they would continue indefinitely.
One of the world’s biggest websites – described as the front page of the internet - is going partially 'dark' as users protest changes that would lead its owners to profit from its trove of data.
Millions of users of Reddit, a social news and discussion board site, have been locked out of groups as part of a blackout that started on Monday.
The row is over Reddit’s proposed charging for access to developers of third-party applications. Some of these applications help people access the site, but the access could also be used by AI language models to perfect human-like writing.
Here's what we know.
What is Reddit?
Reddit is an online discussion forum, which describes itself as the "front page of the internet".
It was launched in 2005 and has become one of the world's most popular websites, with hundreds of millions of monthly users.
Users submit content - which can include pictures, links, videos, or text posts - to the site's communities or 'subreddits', which are organised by subject and managed by moderators.
Popular subreddits including r/Music have gone dark in protest of new fees being charged by Reddit. Source: SBS News / Jessica Bahr
What is the Reddit 'blackout' about?
Third-party apps use Reddit's Application Programming Interface (API) to access and use data from the site.
They also let programs such as ChatGPT and Google's Bard use massive amounts of data from sites such as Reddit to refine the human-like content they churn out.
Access to Reddit's API has previously been free, but from 1 July, Reddit is introducing fees for developers. One developer, Apollo, says the proposed charges will cost it more than US$20 million ($29.5 million) a year and will force it to close down.
According to a group supporting the protest on the site Twitch, more than 7,000 groups had gone dark to oppose Reddit’s new fees.
The row is the latest fallout in the artificial intelligence revolution, with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman unwilling to allow companies that build AI chatbots such as ChatGPT to have free access to the site to perfect their large-language models.
What has been said?
"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," Mr Huffman wrote in a Reddit post on Friday.
The subreddits involved in the blackout protest include r/Music, r/funny, r/gadgets and r/todayilearned — each of which has millions of followers.
While some subreddits said their blackout would last for 48 hours, others, including r/Music, plan to remain 'dark' indefinitely.
Moderators of these chat rooms shut them down, and this caused the whole site to sputter badly for a few hours.
Later on Monday, Reddit posted that it was "observing improvements across the site and expect issue to recover for most users."
