HACKER Q&A
📣 aio2

Who Started the Reddit Blackout?


I know why it happened, but who started it and how did they start it?


  👤 pyeri Accepted Answer ✓
It grew organically to the best of my knowledge. But the extent and addiction of various mods' dependency on these third party apps was something that came as a surprise to me. Didn't knew they actually depended so much more for moderation tools on these 3rd parties than the official reddit platform itself.

👤 el_hacker
I think the first one who talked about it was Christian Selig the developer of the popular third-party Reddit app Apollo. He said that it would cost him $20 million per year to keep his Apollo app running if he had to pay Reddit's new API pricing structure.

👤 rpd9803
i mean I guess Spez started it by trying to monetize the API, unless you meant who started the idea of a blackout as a reaction to that, in which case Im not sure.

👤 nerdbert
Nice try /u/spez

👤 ftxbro
it was reddit themselves manifesting a reactive egregore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore

👤 INGSOCIALITE
u/spez