The blackout seemed to have taken the internet by storm, but not much has been heard about it since. Now that things seem to have mostly been resolved, I want to give an overview of what happened and my thoughts about it all.

Why The Blackout Happened

In case you don't remember or didn't hear about it when it was happening, the Reddit blackout was a mass protest over Reddit's API changes. Previously, access to the API was free, which allowed 3rd party developers to use it to create bots and their own apps for Reddit. However, the CEO of Reddit announced that anybody using more than 100 API calls a minute would have to pay $0.24 for every 1000 API calls. This meant that a very popular 3rd party iOS app for Reddit called Apollo would have to pay $20,000,000 a year. Obviously, not exactly spare change. The developer announced that he would shut down the app on June 30th, which prompted a massive backlash against Reddit. The mods for most of the largest subreddits decided to take all their subreddits and make them private for 2 days, effectively shutting down the entire website.

Why Do People Care This Much About An App?

A few years ago, Reddit got a redesign that proved to be very unpopular. Not only did the redesign replace the classic UI that Reddit had from the start, the redesign was a lot more resource-intensive than the older UI. This made for a website that was a lot less responsive and downright inaccessible for people with old hardware or bad internet. The redesign was widely considered ugly and filled with antipatterns, prompting many users to avoid it as much as possible. To put it in the words of /u/all_copacetic, "Words can't describe how much I hate new reddit. I was actually deeply saddened by the thought that I'd never be able to experience old reddit again. As if a friend had died. I hope to fuck they never remove the option of opting out of the ugly, slow new design.". Unfortunately, while it's still possible to use the old UI, it occasionally forces you into the new UI, which makes it annoying to use. At the same time, part of the new redesign was constant notifications asking you to use the offical app, which many users considered to be annoying and an antipattern. This could be prevented with 3rd party apps, but the API change was going to ruin all that, and many users felt that the API change was designed solely for that reason.

Why That Isn't Why People Cared

The previous section wasn't wrong, but it lacks context. Most people didn't use 3rd party apps, especially Apollo, which is only available on iPhones anyways. A lot of the backlash boiled down to an aversion to what is seen as corporate greed, Reddit's classic love of using the website for mass protest movements, and just because the users with the most power on the website were dragging everybody along with them. The last reason is an important one. Reddit relies on volunteer users to moderate the subreddits, which gives a minority of users a lot of power over how the website is run. Even if people disagree with what the mods do, they don't really have a choice but to go along.

Why Reddit Wasn't Entirely Wrong

The API change came way too fast, but charging for API access isn't unreasonable. These changes only affect heavy users, and apps designed for accessibility will be exempt. If I was a CEO of a massive company, I wouldn't want people to make money by using my infrastructure without paying anything back, either. The pricing is definitely too high, but not enough to completely kill the apps. All you would need to do is kill the free-tier for your app, reduce the number of API calls as much as you can, and you'd still be able to profit.

Why The Mods Were Very Wrong

Like a lot of people pointed out, a 2 day strike is nothing. Some of the mods understood that and decided to go on strike indefinitely, but a lot of them reopened their subreddits as planned. This completely killed the strike, but that's not what I find interesting about all of this. Apparently, a lot of the mods ultimately decided to reopen their subreddits because the CEO threatened to take away their mod rights. That's right: they reopened their subreddits because the Reddit CEO threatened to take away their unpaid job. Wow, such a scary situation to find yourself in /s. Another weird thing that the mods did was coming up with alternative means of protesting, like spamming pictures of John Oliver. I don't know what the plan was there, but Reddit corporate doesn't care that you've posted a picture of John Oliver. What they do care about is increasing the number of people that post on Reddit, so you're literally just rewarding them. All in all, this strike reflected very poorly on the mods.

The Twitter Situation

As I started to come up with this post, Twitter began to rate-limit itself, causing a massive drop in usage. As I began to write this paragraph, Twitter killed its iconic brand. Now that Meta has created Threads to be ~~Twitter's~~ X's first major competitor, it's clear that ~~Twitter~~ X will never be the powerhouse it once was, if it even survives the next couple of years. It's just a coincidence that this happened at the same time as the Reddit fiasco, but it does show that social media is changing massively all at once. Nobody really knows what the future holds for social media, but it certainly feels like we're moving even further away from the era where social media was about the users. Hopefully this leads users to move away for greener pastures, because a website designed to extract as much value out of you at all costs isn't a website worth using.