How did a change in API policies cause the Reddit blackout, also known as Reddark?

Semhar Hidad
3 min readJun 13, 2023

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If you’ve tried accessing a popular subreddit in the past few days, you’ve probably been hit with a denial message that looks something like this:

In this article, we will discuss what Reddit is, what an API is, what changes Reddit has implemented in its API usage, and how this led to a Reddit blackout.

What is Reddit?

Reddit is a popular American social news site and forum that includes over 50 million users. Membership, like most other social media sites, is free. Content is promoted through members voting and curating the content themselves.

The site includes thousands of subreddits, that specialize in a specific topic, finance, technology, health, and wellness.

Each subreddit usually includes moderators who have the ability to remove posts and comments from the content on their subreddit. Usually when they detect spam or a member of the community is breaking community rules.

What is an API?

An API, application programming interface, is a software interface between two devices that allow for data to be passed back and forth.

APIs have risen in popularity over the past decade so much so that a large part of the Web today is a conglomeration of APIs, all sending data back and forth.

APIs have been a huge asset for software developers. They no longer have to build the entirety of their code from scratch for every function. Developers can now link their applications to the API and gain access to the data that they need.

Other social media sites have been using APIs to access data hosted on Reddit and have grown successful. This could be because up until recently, the API that allows access from third parties to Reddit has been free.

What are the new changes in API policies?

On April 18th Reddit announced that there would be a change to its API that would begin on June 19th. This new policy would charge third-party apps $.24 per 1,000 API calls.

These third-party applications, such as Apollo, Sync, and several others have been massively impacted due to this new charge. This change in policy would require apps like Apollo to pay $2 million per month for continued usage of the Reddit API.

Reddit is following the policies that Elon Musk enacted when he took over Twitter, also charging third parties access to their API.

However, in response to this hefty price tag, these changes have forced popular sites to shut down, including Apollo, ReddPlanet, Sync, and RIF (Reddit is Fun).

Why Subreddits have gone dark?

The protest, Reddark, being led by Reddit users is in response to these API policy changes. Reddit users are standing in solidarity with the third-party apps that have been priced out of using Reddit API.

The 48-hour blackout began on June 12, and the popular subreddits, over 8000 have been set to private, denying users access.

The Reddit site also experienced a major outage due to a service issue, on the same day the blackout began.

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