Top 20 Reddit communities that have gone private during Reddit blackout
20 of the biggest communities supporting the Reddit blackout movement to save Third Party apps
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There is currently a Reddit-wide blackout occurring in an attempt to save third-party apps. The reason Third-party apps need saving is that massive API price increases threaten to bankrupt apps that utilize the API. According to the community, these increases are unfair, so they have decided to go dark. Top 20 Reddit communities gone private during Reddit blackout.
Top 20 Reddit communities gone private
Here’s the list of the top 20 Reddit communities ranked by size that have gone private from June 12th – 14th, according to the Reddit Blackout tracker:
| Subreddit | Subscribers |
| r/funny | 49m |
| r/gaming | 37m |
| r/aww | 34m |
| r/Music | 32m |
| r/todayilearned | 31m |
| r/science | 30m |
| r/pics | 30m |
| r/Showerthoughts | 27m |
| r/videos | 26m |
| r/Jokes | 26m |
| r/askscience | 23m |
| r/space | 23m |
| r/food | 23m |
| r/EarthPorn | 23m |
| r/Art | 22m |
| r/books | 22m |
| r/DIY | 22m |
| r/nottheonion | 22m |
| r/explainlikeimfive | 22m |
As you can see, there are more than a few top-ranking subreddits here, each subreddit in the top 20 has over 20 million subscribers. If you added up all of the subscribers from these 20 subreddits alone, you have 524 million users without access to the subs they love.
We here have had to work all day without the distraction of r/funny, or r/pics. It’s the most boring day we’ve ever had at work.
Why are these Reddit communities going private?
You can read our in-depth piece about the Reddit strike if you want the whole picture, essentially, the strike is occurring over API charge increases, which sees Reddit’s API usage go from free to paid.
This is going to put a lot of Third-party Reddit apps out of business due to high charges, one app, Apollo, would have to pay over 20 million a year for it to continue to serve its users using Reddit’s API. Since, then, Apollo has announced it’s closure.
The blackout attempts to put a dent in Reddit’s ad revenue in a bid to get Reddit to revoke the charges applied to its API usage.
If you want to, you can join the Top 20 Reddit communities gone private during the Reddit blackout. You can do this by not using Reddit from June 12th to June 14th.