Reddit Users ‘Going Dark’ To Protest Wildly Unpopular Changes

As we reported last week, Reddit is planning to make some changes under the hood that will essentially kill off every third-party app that readers use to engage with the site’s communities. Given the state of the official app and its heavy reliance on huge ads, it’s a deeply unpopular move, so unpopular that it has led to a protest movement that is including more and more major subreddits by the day.

As the days following the original announcement rolled on, a gathering of Reddit’s unpaid moderators banded together and penned an open letter to the site’s management, outlining not just the general popularity of the third-party apps, but also concerns over the potential loss of important moderation tools (which many third-party apps have but the official offering somehow lacks) and impact on NSFW content as well.

That letter has been backed by plans for much of the site to engage in a “blackout” on June 12, which means individual subreddits will lock down into “private” mode, meaning anyone who isn’t already a follower/subscriber won’t be able to access them or see any of their content.

Alongside big subreddits like r/bestof, r/sports, r/music, r/pics and r/videos, a number of the most popular gaming subreddits have either confirmed they’re taking part, are polling members for their thoughts or will be taking more limited action as well.

That includes r/gaming with its 37 million members, r/PS5 and its 3.3 million members, r/minecraft’s 7 million members and r/wow’s 2.3 million members. Meanwhile mods at r/pcgaming (3.2 million members) are asking users for their input before making a decision, while r/nintendo are going into a “a read-only/restricted mode”, which is not quite as severe as locking the entire subreddit down.