I’ve heard only the briefest information about what is going on with Reddit. Is the blackout something that is temporarily being done by the community or is it permanent?
The blackout itself is an initiative by the community. However, from June 30th third party apps will no longer work, and many users (and moderators of many large subs) have explicitly said that they aren’t interested in continuing with the official Reddit app or site. This will cause a huge chunk of reddit users to leave. Some will go back, some won’t. Besides that, it’s a matter of principle. They’re choosing stakeholders over users.
I think the bigger issue is that a lot of moderation tools are third party apps. Without those apps, whole moderation workflows will fall apart. A lot of the higher quality subs simply won’t have the support to maintain that quality.
While reddit won’t die all that soon, it’s started circling the drain.
