Reddit said most of the company’s communities were operating as normal, four days after an outcry that shut down thousands of its online forums in protest of its plans to increase fees. In a blog post on Thursday, the company said that 80 percent of its top subreddits, or digital message boards, are currently open. The post was the first on Reddit since June 9.
The Reddark website, which has been tracking the outage on the site, said late Thursday that more than 5,000 subreddits were still limiting access to their content. That’s fewer than the nearly 9,000 forums that initially pledged to shut down for a protest starting June 12, which was scheduled to last at least two days.
The dissent stems from Reddit’s decision to charge for access to its application programming interface, or API, which allows developers to embed Reddit functionality into their own apps. The developer of a popular app, called Apollo, wrote that he would have to pay Reddit $20 million (roughly Rs. 160 crore) a year to continue operating under the new pricing policy. Apollo plans to shut down on June 30, the day before Reddit’s price change takes effect.
Reddit has defended its decision to start charging its largest users, who rely on its technology to build apps to navigate the site and organize their posts and data. He also responded to concerns about the fate of accessibility-focused apps, such as those aimed at reading publications for the visually impaired, and said that certain apps would be exempt from the new charges.
In Thursday’s post, Reddit said that 98 percent of third-party apps would not have to pay anything under the new fee structure, and that the fees it would charge developers were in line with its own costs.
“Mods and users want communities to be open and accessible,” the company wrote, and after expressing their point of view, “many communities have decided to reopen.”
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