The Reddit community always wins – Why devs should revert API changes

Nothing has ever triumphed over the power of the Reddit community

Table of Contents Table of Contents

The Reddit community is a formidable foe, if you go up against it or threaten its way of life, you’d better be ready to face the consequences. Here’s the story of how the Reddit community always wins.

---

The Reddit community always wins

The Reddit community is currently assembling a massive blackout for 2 days over the new API charges that Reddit developers are imposing. We won’t go into too much detail about that because we already have a background on this whole strike in our: “Huge Reddit protest set to commence June 12th” article.

But the jist is this; Developers that use the Reddit API are going to be charged a huge amount to use the API, as it was previously free. These apps are essential to some larger subreddits as they assist in monitoring them. So Reddit is going dark for 2 days in an effort to get the devs to revise the decision.

This is not the first time this has happened, however, Reddit has gone on strike many times before, with mostly successful results. We have a few examples here to share.

Reddit strike examples

Times when the Reddit community went on strike:

• July 2015: Victoria Taylor’s firing – Victoria Taylor, a popular administrator who coordinated Reddit’s Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions, was abruptly fired by the company. This led to widespread discontent among the Reddit community, resulting in a large-scale blackout of numerous popular subreddits. The protest aimed to express frustration with the lack of communication and transparency from Reddit’s administration.
  
• March 2021: Controversial personnel dismissal – A Reddit admin known as “Aimee Challenor” was dismissed due to controversies surrounding her father’s past. This decision, combined with concerns about transparency and communication from Reddit administrators, sparked protests across multiple subreddits, with some going private and others encouraging users to boycott the site for a day.

These examples demonstrate instances where parts of the Reddit community took collective action to express their dissatisfaction or to draw attention to specific issues. These strikes and shutdowns aimed to raise awareness and encourage Reddit’s administration to address the concerns of the community.

---

Reddit’s wall street influence

And of course, we have to mention the time that Reddit essentially broke the stock market, putting the short squeeze on short sellers. Here’s an excerpt from The Independent.

“At this point, the amateur investors of WallStreetBets entered the fray.

Several Reddit users called for people to pile into GameStop shares, pushing up the price to put pressure on the short-sellers – a process known as a short squeeze.

Many Reddit posts suggested that this was a way to punish hedge funds that were seeking to profit from a company’s troubles.”

---

The Reddit community always gets what it wants

It’s basically over for the developers at this point, If this protest fails then Reddit will just organize a more drastic one next month, and then the month after, and so on and so forth. The Reddit community cannot be stopped.

If the Reddit devs alienate the pioneers of communities then we could see a large chunk of the community boycotting Reddit and seeking another platform to host their communities. This would be detrimental to Reddit as right now it seems like there are tens of millions of users going to be denied access to the subs they love for two whole days.

The might of the Reddit community is unbeatable, and one of the things we admire about Reddit is its ability to accomplish things effectively. The developers should not be squeezing their users out of greed, they should be working with them to nurture a platform that really works, as it does now.