The “blackout challenge” on Reddit is a dangerous and potentially life-threatening online trend that gained attention on the platform. The challenge involves participants intentionally depriving themselves of oxygen, often by strangulation or suffocation, to induce a temporary state of unconsciousness. Participants would share their experiences and discuss the challenge on Reddit, often using specific subreddit threads dedicated to the topic.
However, it’s important to note that engaging in the blackout challenge can lead to severe injuries, permanent damage, or even death. The challenge poses significant risks, mainly without supervision or knowledge of the potential dangers. Due to the extreme nature of the challenge and the harm it can cause, many communities and platforms, including Reddit, have taken steps to remove and discourage discussions related to this dangerous activity. It’s crucial to prioritize safety and well-being and avoid participating in or promoting harmful challenges like the blackout.
Thousands of popular Reddit communities dedicated to topics ranging from Apple Inc to gaming and music locked out their users on Monday in protest against the company’s plan to charge for access to its data.
Starting next month, third-party app developers using Reddit’s vast troves of data will have to pay the price, and the changes could affect players across the spectrum – from deeper-pocketed companies such as OpenAI to small developers.
The Apollo app – popular among Redditors for its alternate interface to the official platform – has said the exorbitant fees have “made it impossible” to continue offering the service.
What prompted the blackout?
The action has been in the works for weeks after Reddit announced in April that it would start charging third parties for its application programming interface (API).
This software framework allows a data provider and an end-user to communicate.
From July 1, Reddit plans to charge developers with higher usage limits $0.24 for every 1,000 API calls or less than $1 per user monthly.
Apollo said that with their current usage, the charges would cost more than $20 million a year.
Why is Reddit making the change?
One of the reasons is generative AI.
Reddit’s conversation forums have a lot of data that can be used to train tools such as ChatGPT, the viral chatbot from Microsoft-backed OpenAI. While some of this data can be collected unstructured, Reddit’s API makes it easier for companies to find and collate the data directly.
IN APRIL, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an interview with the New York Times that the “Reddit corpus of data is precious”, and he doesn’t want to “need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
Who gets affected, and when will the Reddit blackout end?
Thousands of subreddits – the forums dedicated to a specific topic on Reddit – are protesting the move. Most of their moderators have planned a 48-hour blackout during which the pages go private, meaning millions of users will be left without access.
Unlike most social media platforms, Reddit heavily depends on community moderators, “or mods”, who police their subreddits for free to weed out offensive or illegal content.
What are third-party app developers saying?
Christian Selig, creator of the Apollo app for Reddit, last week tweeted the service will close down on June 30.
Huffman has said other third-party apps such as Reddit is Fun and Sync have also decided the new pricing “doesn’t work for their businesses and will close before pricing goes into effect”.
What is Reddit saying?
Huffman on Friday noted the frustration among many moderators of Reddit communities but said the company could no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use as it needs to be a “self-sustaining business”.
What are other social media companies doing?
Elon Musk’s Twitter in January restricted all third-party clients and apps and updated its rules for developers accessing its APIs.
The new rules said developers cannot use the company’s API to create “a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Application.”
A widespread Reddit blackout affecting some of the site’s largest communities has continued into its third day with no signs of stopping, as several groups on the site vowed to remain closed off indefinitely to protest changes to the platform’s data policies.
As of Wednesday morning, more than 6,000 subreddits remained inaccessible and in private mode after what began as a two-day voluntary shutdown. The blackout includes popular forums such as r/aww, r/videos and r/music, each claiming more than 25 million subscribers on the platform.
