The protest in Reddit and its implications with the blind community

Reddit is a social media platform and online community where users can participate in discussions, share content, and discover a wide range of topics. It consists of thousands of communities called "subreddits," each dedicated to a specific theme, interest, or subject. Users can join these subreddits to engage in conversations, post text or media content, and vote on posts and comments.

Reddit is known for its diverse user base and wide range of content, from news and discussions to memes and entertainment.

In recent days, Reddit users have started a protest against changes to the site's “API”, which lets other companies use Reddit data in their own products and services.

More than 8,000 subreddits have joined the protest and turned “private” this Monday, preventing anyone outside the community from seeing their posts.

Among the companies affected by this decision are Apollo for Reddit, rif is fun for Reddit, ReddPlanet, Sync, and many others, which provide services from navigation to accessibility, as in the case of Apollo.

The subreddit r/blind, which has the largest blind community within the social network, expressed concern that many of its users use the Apollo app to navigate and interact on Reddit, and with changes to the social network, users would pay the monetary cost of these actions.

In this regard, the subreddit r/blind expressed the following: "If Reddit was a restaurant third-party apps are franchises. We can get a burger from Reddit directly or from a franchise. The official Reddit location is at the top of a cliff. Disabled people can't get there. Reddit is charging franchise fees so high nobody else can afford to offer burgers. We, with thousands of other subreddits, have gone dark for 48 hours. We will be back on June 14. Our Discord server remains open. Thank you for understanding; app so bad, vision required to go dark".

At Strap Tech we firmly believe that the most important thing is the community, as well as inclusion and the right that we all have to information in all its modalities, and this change in Reddit will be a hard blow that will affect the users, and the companies involved with inclusion.

We are making big strides toward a more accessible world through technology and this is a step backward that we hope can be fixed as soon as possible.

With information from:

Reddit communities to 'go dark' in protest over third-party app charges https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/11/reddit-communities-to-go-dark-in-protest-over-third -party-app-charges

It's not just Apollo: other Reddit apps are shutting down, too https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754616/reddit-third-party-apps-api-shutdown-rif-reddplanet-sync

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