If you inhabit a certain corner of the internet, populated by nerds and developers and music obsessives and shitposters (sometimes one and the same), you may have noticed some changes. Roughly 30 percent of Reddit is currently dark, with more than 2,000 subreddits—the individual community forums housed on the site, which are moderated by volunteers—involved in an ongoing protest of Reddit's decision to charge third-party app developers for access to the company's backend.
Though the protest was originally planned for June 12–14, many subreddits have extended their strike, as the initial coordinated action yielded no sign of reversal from CEO Steve Huffman. Thus, Reddit's saga is a case study in the perils of relying on user-generated content and volunteer moderators as a business model—and the extraordinary power of this decentralized model to push back on unpopular decisions made by the C-suite.
