Reddit communities go private to protest the company's recent decisions

Over 7,000 Reddit communities, known as subreddits, have been set to private to protest recent decisions by Reddit regarding forced pricing on API data collection. 

When trying to access any of these locked subreddits, the message that pops up says that this community has been set to private "to protest recent admin decisions about API fees that harm users". It also adds that only approved members can view and take part in the locked subreddit's discussions.

In April this year, Reddit announced their plans to charge AI developers for API (Application Programming Interface) access to the website, which is necessary to train large-language models (LLMs) of AI chatbots like ChatGPT and certain AI-based apps. 

Under Reddit's new ruling, which is planned to come into effect from July 1, every 1,000 API calls will cost Reddit users $0.24. To note, one API call is made for each new data request by the AI app. Reddit added that any app making less than 100 calls per minute will be able to access the API for zero cost. 

While the pricing might not seem a lot at first, this $0.24 per 1,000 calls can easily pile up, especially for developers dependent on collecting vast amounts of data to run their AI app. Third-party apps such as Reddit is Fun and Apollo, which are dependent on API data collection to provide a better Reddit experience for users, are estimated to be required to pay millions of dollars a year once the ruling goes live.

According to many of these locked subreddits, this forced fee on app developers directly harms users, from bigger companies like OpenAI to smaller, independent developers.

According to Downdetector.com, Reddit faced an outage of about 2 hours on June 12, presumably due to thousands of these subreddits going down at once. Downdetector.com, at the current time of writing, states that "user reports indicate possible problems at Reddit", though the main website - aside from the aforementioned locked subreddits - is up and running. 

According to a recent company letter sent by Reddit CEO and co-founder, Steve Huffman, the company is also planning to fire 5% of their total workforce.