After two days of reddit blackouts, some communities on the site are choosing to stay dark. r/Music is one of them—32 million strong and currently private.
Moderators of many reddit communities have decided to extend the blackout indefinitely. These moderators rely on third-party tools and have for years to moderate their communities. Reddit has promised to build a suite of in-house moderating tools—but has yet to deliver on that promise. The music subreddit isn’t the only one seeking to stay private to get the message across. Other popular subreddits including r/aww, r/videos, r/nba, and r/gaming have all agreed to stay private.
At the peak of the reddit blackouts this week, more than 8,400 subreddits went dark or were restricted. The blackouts caused Reddit to crash on Monday and the company has declined to comment on the blackout publicly. But Reddit CEO Steve Huffman sent an internal memo to employees to say “this will eventually pass.”
“There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well,” the memo reads. “We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long-term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.”
Reddit first announced changes to its API pricing in April 2023—closely following examples set by Elon Musk’s Twitter. Reddit initially told third-party app developers these changes wouldn’t be exorbitant. But third-party app developer Christian Selig, who maintains the popular iOS app Apollo says it would cost him $20 million to maintain his current userbase at the new API pricing. As such, many third-party apps have chosen to shutdown on June 30, the day before the API pricing change takes effect.
The outcome of this reddit blackout will be interesting. For most of its lifetime, reddit did not have a mobile app. After it acquired Alien Blue—the company got to work enshittifying the new mobile app beyond usability for most power users. Now the company is banking that its core audience won’t leave like the big Digg Migration that helped reddit grow. Unfortunately, federated link aggregators like Lemmy, KBin, and Tildes are rising—and feature robust music communities.