Online Community Protesting

 As part of this class, I started renewing my personal interest in Reddit. I started noticing some of the subreddits I was interested in announcing that they were 'going dark' as a boycott. I wasn't sure what exactly that meant, so I did a bit of reading. 

Reddit is charging 3rd party apps a higher fee (I believe), and this creates a few barriers. Moderators will find their jobs more difficult, as they rely on certain apps to be able to do the moderating more easily. Second, some people use the third party apps to be able to access content at all for services such as screen reading. This is a huge issue for people who need those items to be able to consume media. 

"Going dark" means the subreddit went private and people cannot browse it on their own. I did not know this was possible. Some are doing this short term, and others are doing it more long term. 

I find this interesting as people are joining together to protest their disappointment by taking away the platform's interaction with the public. Have other platforms had similar boycotts and how have they ended? 

I know I have already experienced the effects of this - I wanted to view a subreddit but I could not because I was not previously a member of it without messaging the mods. 

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