The 2023 Reddit Blackout, and What Happened to the Mods Who Led It
In April 2023, Reddit announced it would start charging for API access (the pipes third-party apps like Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync ran on). The prices Reddit set were, by the developers’ own math, high enough to shut those apps down entirely. Apollo’s developer estimated the new pricing at roughly $20 million a year for his app alone.
Moderators (the unpaid volunteers who actually run Reddit’s communities) organized the response. On June 12, 2023, more than 8,000 subreddits went dark, switching to private mode in protest. A few days later, over 5,000 of them were still dark past the original 48-hour deadline, and some mod teams said they intended to stay closed indefinitely.
How Reddit responded
Reddit’s official position was that mods could protest, as long as they didn’t break the Moderator Code of Conduct. In practice, “protest within the rules” turned into Reddit deciding which forms of protest counted as rule-breaking.
When some subreddits pivoted from “go fully private” to marking their communities NSFW instead (a workaround that kept them technically open but effectively unusable, since NSFW subreddits are stripped of ads), Reddit started removing the moderator teams responsible, citing the same Code of Conduct as grounds. r/mildlyinteresting had its moderators reinstated after reverting the NSFW tag; r/interestingasfuck and r/TIHI stayed archived. By July, Forbes was reporting further mod removals as the standoff continued.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman didn’t soften the message in public either. In interviews during the protest, he described moderators as “landed gentry”: people who “get there first and get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants,” and said he intended to change the rules that let them keep that position.
Why this matters beyond one protest
Set aside whether Reddit’s API pricing was reasonable. Reasonable people disagree. The part worth sitting with is the mechanism: Reddit’s unpaid moderators are the actual labor running the site’s communities, hold their positions at Reddit’s pleasure, and found out in real time that organizing against a business decision could cost them the communities they built, decided unilaterally by the company whose product they were protesting.
That’s not a uniquely evil thing to do. Plenty of companies control the platforms volunteers build on top of. It is, however, a very good reason not to build your only outlet for speaking to a community entirely on infrastructure someone else can revoke without a hearing.
Sources: Reddit API controversy, Wikipedia · TechCrunch, June 12 2023 · Forbes, June 15 2023 · TechCrunch, June 22 2023 · Forbes, July 21 2023 · NBC News, June 2023