Thousands of Reddit forums went dark Monday in one of the largest user-driven protests ever to hit the social media platform.

The voluntary blackouts, which restrict groups’ content from being publicly visible, affect Reddit’s largest online communities, including popular groups devoted to music, history, sports, and video games. The protests include more than two dozen subreddits with at least 10 million subscribers, as well as thousands of smaller networks.

Monday’s protests reflect widespread outrage over a Reddit plan to charge millions of dollars in fees for some third-party apps to continue accessing the platform. The plan has already forced several of Reddit’s top app-makers to announce they are shutting down because they cannot afford the new costs, which are set to begin as soon as next month.

The confrontation between Reddit’s corporate management and its users and developers marks a turning point for the platform as it reportedly looks to go public later this year. For years, Reddit users could browse posts, write comments and share pictures and video on Reddit from third-party apps.

Now, however, Reddit is seeking large payments from app makers to maintain that same level of access through its application programming interface (API), in a move apparently aimed at better monetizing Reddit users. Last week Christian Selig, developer of the popular Apollo app, said Reddit wanted to charge him US$20 million a year to keep his app running. He later said he has no choice but to close down the app.

Reddit further inflamed tensions with some in its developer community by appearing to misrepresent the details of its private conversation with Selig to suggest he had blackmailed the company. Selig, however, recorded his phone call with the company, a fact Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman later acknowledged in a Q&A with users.

Selig’s app is just one casualty of the coming changes. Critics of Reddit say the platform’s steep fees will kill off all third-party competition against Reddit’s proprietary app, which many users have derided as slow, buggy and inferior. They also fear the moves will decimate a volunteer community that relies on third-party tools to do the critical work of moderating Reddit forums — responsibility Reddit delegates to users of the site rather than to its own paid employees or to contractors, unlike some other large social networks.

Reddit’s defenders, including some users, have said it is Reddit’s right to set its own prices for API access, and that it is a business entitled to control how users access the data on the platform it provides.

Words to Learn 相关词汇

【上市】shàngshì go public sell to the public shares of a privately owned company

【加剧】jiājù inflame make worse

数以千计的红迪论坛周一陷入黑暗，这是该社交媒体平台上有史以来规模最大的用户抗议活动之一。

这一天，很多红迪最热门的在线社区，包括一些讨论音乐、历史、体育和视频游戏的社区，都主动关闭了，导致页面无法打开。抗议活动涉及二十多个拥有至少1000万用户的子社区，以及数以千计的小型社区。

周一的抗议活动反映了人们对红迪收费计划的愤慨，该平台将对第三方应用程序收取数百万美元的费用，否则将不能继续通过第三方应用访问该平台。该计划已经迫使红迪几个顶级应用宣布即将关闭，因为无法负担最快于下个月开始收取的新增费用。

红迪管理层与其用户和开发者之间的冲突标志了该平台的一个转折点，据说它希望今年晚些时候上市。多年来，红迪用户可以通过第三方应用程序在该平台上浏览帖子、写评论、分享图片和视频。

而今第三方应用如果要通过应用程序接口（API）访问红迪，则要被收取巨额费用，此举显然是要将流量变现。上周，第三方应用阿波罗的开发者克里斯蒂安•塞利格说，如果要维持程序正常运行，红迪将向他收取每年2千万美元的费用。他别无选择，只能关闭该应用。

红迪歪曲了与塞利格私下谈话的细节，暗示他勒索公司，进一步激化了与部分开发者的紧张关系。塞利格把他与红迪的通话录了音，红迪联合创始人兼首席执行官史蒂夫•赫夫曼后来在与用户交流时承认了这一事实。

塞利格的应用只是即将到来的变化的一个牺牲品。红迪的批评者说，该平台高昂的费用将扼杀所有第三方应用，而红迪自己的平台一直被认为运行缓慢、使用体验差。他们还担心，这将影响红迪社区，因为志愿者往往通过第三方应用来主持论坛 —— 红迪将这一责任交给网站用户，而不是像其他一些大型社交网络那样交给自己的雇员或外包服务。

支持红迪的人，包括一些用户，则说平台有权给API访问定价，有权决定用户如何访问平台提供的数据。

(SD-Agencies)