Reddit will be just a fraction of its usual self for the next couple of days. Nearly 7,200 of the site’s subreddits have gone dark as of 10:15 a.m. ET Monday, as moderators of those forums protest the company’s decision to start charging some third-party apps for access to the company’s application programming interface (API), a tool powering popular tools that give users an alternate way to browse Reddit’s forums.
The blackout is a black eye in many ways for the site. Besides alienating both users and the volunteers that oversee the subreddits, the site and the fallout of the protest are being closely watched by Wall Street, as Reddit quietly filed for an IPO at the end of 2021. The company has stayed in a holding pattern since then, but many investors expect it to begin trading later this year. At the time of its filing, Reddit said it expected to exceed $1 billion in annual ad revenue by 2023.
