What began for some communities as a two-day show of solidarity, though, has become an indefinite blackout to drive their point home. And the move isn’t just affecting people who spend lots of time on Reddit — you may find the proof yourself, the next time you Google something.
Because those subreddits have been made private, the years of content, conversations and camaraderie found in those online enclaves will remain off-limits until further notice. The same goes for the insights locked away in those threads, to the detriment of people searching for information rooted in human experience or expertise.
If you’re searching Google for advice on a persnickety tech question, or the finer points of learning Japanese, there is a good chance you will find a helpful conversation on Reddit. (Sticking “Reddit” at the end of online search queries is so common that it’s become a meme at this point.)
The catch? You won’t be able to read that conversation, because subreddits like r/techsupport and r/learnjapanese are now inaccessible for the long haul.
In Sukrit Venkatagiri’s case, the Reddit blackout has at least temporarily made the prospect of buying his first house a little more daunting. A researcher at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Venkatagiri has spent a lot of time searching the web for interest rates to suss out the right time to buy property. He says Reddit has been invaluable because it contains “a diverse set of opinions on topics that aren’t necessarily influenced by commercial interests.”
“I found Reddit really helpful because it just helps me understand other people’s thought processes and then come to my own decision,” he said. But because some salient Reddit threads found in Google search results aren’t accessible, most of what he has to wade through now are “blogs from large financial organizations that say, ‘Hey, you should just buy a house.’”
Popular communities like r/aww, r/music, and r/videos, each of which has tens of millions of members, have signaled their intent to remain dark until Reddit changes its stance on data access and pricing for third-party developers. And as of Tuesday evening, more than 300 other subreddits, dedicated to everything from DIY projects to the restaurant chain Applebee’s, also committed to staying private indefinitely.
That means if you’ve been planning to learn a little more about physics, cars, endocrinology, food in Vancouver, model making, Apple, furniture or lamp restoration, among other topics — your list of online resources just got a little shorter.
Reddit declined to comment on the situation.
Finding insights elsewhere
If you’ve relied on Reddit in the past to help connect to like-minded groups of people, you still have some options. Many subreddits have their own Discord servers, so as long as you’re willing to put up with a generally faster pace of conversation, you can find a similar atmosphere. For those in need of answers for technical questions (and a few general interest ones, too), sites like StackExchange may come in handy.
Other corners of Reddit have also taken to highlighting full-on replacement platforms, like Squabbles.io and Lemmy, a decentralized, open-source alternative.
Those services, which in many cases are relatively new and sparsely populated, may be able to offer the kind of community some displaced Reddit users are searching for. But what they can’t do — in the short term, anyway — is fill in for Reddit as a vast, easily accessible pool of knowledge and experience.
And at the end of the day, there really is nothing else quite like Reddit out there. That’s at least in part because the site — which is nearly 20 years old — is a social media holdover from an older era of the web, when lengthy discussion threads had yet to be supplanted by, say, short-form videos.
Venkatagiri said other platforms that have lasted as long as Reddit, like Facebook and Twitter, are structurally different in ways that can prevent them from being as immediately helpful.
“You can’t do a Google search for something in a Facebook group,” he said. And on Twitter, “you may interact for a short period of time, but you don’t have that sort of longevity of interaction that Reddit affords.”
For now, it’s not clear who will back down first: Reddit, or the communities taking a stand against it. But in the meantime, be prepared to spend at least a little more time searching for the right information online.
