So this week the front page of the internet actually looked like something out of a bad dream if you're the kind of person who has Reddit open in a tab pretty much all day (guilty). Starting Monday, thousands of subreddits went private or restricted in protest over Reddit's new API pricing, and as of today a bunch of the big ones (r/pics, r/videos, a pile of the gaming and tech subs I actually read) are staying dark indefinitely instead of the planned 48 hours. I checked r/mechanicalkeyboards this morning out of habit and got a little "this community is private" wall. Weird feeling.
Quick background in case you've been off the grid: back in April, Reddit told third-party app developers they'd have to start paying for API access, and the pricing wasn't subtle. Christian Selig, the guy who built Apollo (genuinely the best Reddit client that has ever existed, fight me), did the math publicly and said it would cost him something like $20 million a year to keep running at current usage. Not a typo. He announced on June 8th that Apollo is shutting down on June 30th. I've had that app on my phone since 2019 and I'm annoyed in a very specific, personal way about losing it, not just annoyed in the abstract "protecting the open web" way, though I'm that too.
The part that actually bugs me
What got me wasn't even the pricing number, it was Reddit CEO Steve Huffman's AMA a few days before the blackout. People asked pretty direct questions about why moderators (unpaid volunteers, remember) were getting steamrolled on a decision that affects the tools they rely on, and the answers felt like they were written by someone who'd never once used a screen reader or needed the accessibility features third-party apps built that the official app still doesn't have. That's the actual crux of it for a lot of blind and low-vision Redditors: this isn't just "old man yells at redesign," some of these apps were the only usable way in.
I've been on Reddit since basically the Digg exodus in 2010, which if you remember this blog's early days, is a big chunk of why techpad exists in its current form (I moved my RSS habits over around the same time everyone else did). So watching the platform do the thing every platform eventually does (get big, resent the ecosystem that helped it get big, squeeze it) isn't exactly shocking. It's just annoying to watch happen to a place I still like, in real time, on a Tuesday.
Practically, here's where I've landed: I'm keeping the official app for the handful of subs I actually post in, and I've gone back to old.reddit.com in a browser tab for everything else, which is honestly not that much worse than Apollo was for pure reading. I lose the gesture navigation and the nice image viewer, but I don't lose the content. If you're a mod of anything, I'd just say: I don't envy the position you're in this week, choosing between the community you built and getting your hand forced by a company that owns the servers.
One small tangent since I'm already off topic: I finally watched the full WWDC keynote from a couple weeks back on my lunch break, and I still can't get over that Vision Pro costs $3,499. That's more than my first car. I have zero plans to buy one, but I respect the commitment to a bad-idea price tag, if that's a thing you can respect.
Anyway. If your favorite subreddit went dark this week, it's not a glitch, it's a protest, and depending on the mod team it might stay that way a while. I'd bet money some of the bigger subs cave within a month once ad revenue conversations happen internally, but a few of the stubborn ones will probably hold out on principle alone, which I kind of love even if it's futile. Apollo's got until the 30th. I'll probably keep it installed until the exact hour it stops working, out of some misplaced sense of loyalty to an app.