Reddit went through some issues for many on Monday, with the outage happening the same day as thousands of subreddits going dark to protest the site’s new API pricing terms.
According to Reddit, the blackout was responsible for the problems. “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge. The company said the outage was fully resolved at 1:28PM ET.
“More than 7,000 subreddits have gone private or read-only in response to the API pricing terms”
Holy crap!
Can that be right? 93% of subreddits have gone dark?
And 7% of subreddits are scabs?!
If you click through to some of the ones that indicate still public you can see they have gone into read-only mode rather than completely private.
Looking at this from a leadership perspective when communicating to investors, it’s a lot easier to explain the low user engagement over the next couple days as a blip due to a service outage blocking access rather than due to an intentional protest against using the site.
Not suggesting this is deliberate, but I do imagine this is actually a best case scenario to them in some ways.
Exactly. If people want this protest to be taken seriously, they shouldn’t have pre-emptively announced it would only be 48 hours long. 48 hours is nothing to worry about when you know it’s coming. Like you said, they’ll just blame the lack of engagement on server issues.
I love the format of kbin, with some TLC i can see it taking off. I like it better than Lemmy’s layout. As to people returning after 48 hours, doesn’t that depend on Reddit caving in? I don’t see that happening, so why would anyone return if Reddit’s terms are egregious? They going to cough up the money to Reddit to use their API? People just going to cave in and use their shit app, enduring the ads and personal data farming? This should be interesting.
