Thousands of popular Reddit communities dedicated to topics ranging from Apple Inc to gaming and music locked out their users on Monday in protest against the company's plan to charge for access to its data.
The Apollo app - popular among Redditors for its alternate interface to the official platform - has said the exorbitant fees have"made it impossible" to continue offering the service.The action has been in the works for weeks after Reddit announced in April that it would start charging third parties for its application programming interface - a software framework that allows a data provider and an end-user to communicate with each other.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an interview with the New York Times in April that the"Reddit corpus of data is really valuable" and he doesn't want to"need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.
Unlike most other social media platforms, Reddit is heavily dependent on community moderators,"or mods", who police their subreddits for free to weed out offensive or illegal content.Christian Selig, creator of the Apollo app for Reddit, last week tweeted the service will close down on June 30.