In a series of interviews, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has acknowledged an ongoing Reddit blackout has caused a “fair amount of trouble,” but has no plans to walk back the site’s controversial changes to pricing.
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Earlier in the week, thousands of Reddit’s largest subreddits — including gaming communities r/PS5, r/Terraria, /rEscapeFromTarkov and r/Gaming— switched to an inaccessible private mode as part of an organised blackout.
The blackout is in response to a proposed price hike for Reddit’s Application Programming Interface, back-end data that third-party mobile apps and custom extensions rely on, along with tools for accessibility and moderation.
Though the price hikes aren’t set to kick in until July 1, they have already led to Reddit’s two largest third-party apps, Reddit Is Fun and Apollo, announcing their closure.
In a recent interview with NPR, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman dismissed the resulting protests as “a small group that’s very upset,” and acknowledged that moving third-party users to Reddit’s official app would offer “significant” benefits to the company’s profits.
The CEO also claimed that “everyday users” are being affected by the blackouts more than his company. That being said, many subreddits have continued ongoing Reddit’s blackout — by Huffman’s own admission, 20 per cent of Reddit’s largest subreddits remain in private mode, days after the 48-hour protest was meant to end on June 14.
