When a baby gets dropped on its head, its skull isn’t yet solid enough to adequately cushion the developing brain from serious damage. The damage can result in improper formation of the brain onward into adolescence and ultimately adulthood, resulting in stunted emotional responses and a reduced ability to reason.

u/spez, AKA Steve Huffman, AKA “Fuck u/spez”, is one of the founder and current CEO of Reddit, who is currently in a bit of a kerfuffle over charging an absurd of money for API access in an attempt to shut out third party app developers.

Reddit’s main asset is all the posts and comments people make, and they get money by selling ads where people look at that content. A small percentage of people look at the content with aps that Reddit didn’t make, so they don’t see Reddit’s ads. More recently, the AIs like ChatGPT have started scraping content like Reddit in order to get better, and they don’t pay Reddit for that either.

So Reddit made a change: in order to get to Reddit’s content with anything other than their ad-serving interfaces, you have to pay them something. The people who made those other aps agreed that that was fair, but the price Reddit set for it was way higher than any of them could afford, even with increased prices of their own. Reddit made some other changes, too, like saying none of those apps could see NSFW content, and that they couldn’t have their own ads. They also have a very short notice for the changes to take effect, so the people making the aps didn’t have time to implement compatible changes even if they wanted to. Most have decided to give up on their apps.

Many of the people using these apps, even though they’re a small percentage, are some of the most prolific posters, and many are moderators (who are unpaid and put in a lot of work). They decided to organize a “blackout,” where their subreddits went offline in one way or another for a couple days as a form of protest. Reddit didn’t make any concessions in response, so many of the subreddits decided to extend the blackout, and many people decided to find alternatives to Reddit, like this place here.

Reddit made changes such that a community can “vote out” a moderator who keeps their subreddit dark in order to force an end to the blackout. Some subreddits have decided to open back up, but with new rules that confine the content to something silly (e.g., r/pics, which used to for any photographs, now only allows “sexy pictures of John Oliver”).