Discord must be loving this: All the big MMORPG subreddits have been flagged private right now in protest over Reddit’s planned API switcharoo, with many Reddits directing gamers to Discord instead.
As we covered last week, Reddit announced major changes to its pricing structure for third-party apps that effectively make it financially impossible for those apps to continue, which means most of the mobile and accessibility Reddit apps you likely use yourself (and certainly the tools volunteer mods deploy) will be pulled down if they haven’t been already, all in the service of boosting ad revenue ahead of what watchers assume will be an IPO listing for the company.
This is presumably why Steve “spez” Huffman ran an AMA this past weekend “addressing the community” about the changes, but Huffman actually spent most of his ink reiterating the changes (rather than making concessions in the face of a mass user revolt) and bizarrely attacking the creator of one of the biggest indie Reddit apps, who has already announced the closure of his app (Apollo) because of Reddit’s absurd new terms and expectation that he pay it $20M annually. (The Apollo dev is far from the only dev who’s called Reddit out on this.)
So if you’re wondering why you can’t access r/MMORPG, r/WoW, r/GuildWars2, or r/SWTOR today… that’s why. (It looks like the r/FFXIV sub, which announced it would be going dark, forgot to do it. [Update: It’s dark now.]) MOP reader Zendadaist even pointed out smaller MMO subs have shown solidarity, including Champions Online, RIFT, and Anarchy Online. As many as 7000 other subreddits have joined the protest, causing major outages across the platform.
Watching the insane Reddit outage boycott right now https://t.co/5S22GZbrmO
— Syp (@Sypster) June 12, 2023
