How Private Are Some Subreddits After Steve Huffman’s AMA? Resolving the API Outage for Reddit
The platform is unwilling to budge. CEO Steve Huffman held the company line during an AMA on Friday, angering many Reddit users and causing some subreddits to go private earlier than planned. I asked Reddit on Sunday if it still planned to move forward with the API pricing, and Rathschmidt said the company wasn’t planning any changes to what’s been announced.
On Monday morning, Reddit’s status page reported a “major outage” affecting Reddit’s desktop and mobile sites and its native mobile apps. In a message on their status page at 10:58 AM, the company stated that they were aware of problems loading content and were working to resolve them.
At 11:47AM PT, the company wrote that “We’re observing improvements across the site and expect issue to recover for most users. We will keep a close eye on the situation. Rathschmidt didn’t have an ETA for when things would be fixed, but the status has switched from “major outage” back to “operational.”
Numerous well-known communities with tens of millions of subscribers have been listed in four seperate threads in r/Mod Coord.
Many subreddits participating in the protest are going private for 48 hours, from June 12th to June 14th, but some plan to stay private until things change, according to a pinned post in the subreddit r/Save3rdPartyApps.
Moderators began planning the actions last week after the developers of some of Reddit’s most-beloved third-party apps said they wouldn’t be able to afford the platform’s updated API pricing. On Thursday, the developers for Apollo for Reddit and others announced they would be shutting down their apps on June 30th due to the API changes.
“This isn’t something any of us do lightly: we do what we do because we love Reddit, and we truly believe this change will make it impossible to keep doing what we love,” r/Toptomcat wrote in the post. r/polls and r/TIHI were among those that went dark in the wake of CEO Steve Huffman’s poorly received FridayAMA.