The Reddit blackout: Why are your favourite pages going offline

When Reddit goes dark, thousands of users forget what they used to do on the internet before the news aggregator became popular. 

Well, it's time to revisit old habits.

Some of Reddit's most popular pages might not be accessible to its users due to the ongoing Reddit Blackout protest set to last at least for the next 48 hours.

Reddit's most popular communities are going dark in protest against "ludicrous" pricing changes which will impact millions, reports Sky News. 

In April, Reddit announced it would start charging for developers to access its API - which stands for an application programming interface. 

"The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable," Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, told the New York Times in April. 

The platforms used to let developers access its API to access information on the platform, which lead to developers running alternate apps for users who had difficulty using the original app. 

Whenever you use a Reddit app, you are essentially asking the platform's API for permission to look at the posts, comments and profiles you want to see. 

So why didn't people just use the Reddit app? 

It's important to note that Reddit was launched back in 2005, but its own app wasn't made available until 2016. 

It meant that users had to rely on third-party apps for a long time, and many got so accustomed to their chosen option that they never switched to the official one. 

Infinity, Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Narwhal and Relay are some of the most used third-party apps of Reddit. 

How expensive will Reddit's latest move be?

Even though the platform didn't reveal the exact pricing yet, the makers of the popular third-party app Apollo have claimed they would be charged more than $20m (£15.9m) a year at their current rate of API usage. 

Such apps would need to charge about $5 (£4) a user each month simply to pay the new fees to Reddit, Apollo's sole developer, Christian Selig, has estimated, reports The Guardian. 

For comparison, popular media-hosting service Imgur charges Apollo $166 for 50 million API calls, and it's worth noting that Imgur is serving much heavier content in photos and videos than the generic Reddit request which may just be a bunch of text.

In a group statement, the moderators of the thousands of subreddits that were joining the protest said: "On June 12th, many subreddits will be going dark to protest this policy. Some will return after 48 hours: others will go away permanently unless the issue is adequately addressed. 

"Since many moderators aren't able to put in the work they do with the poor tools available through the official app. This isn't something any of us do lightly: we do what we do because we love Reddit, and we truly believe this change will make it impossible to keep doing what we love," the statement added. 

The conflict on Reddit is mostly the result of a conflict between the social network and AI firms like OpenAI, which have used vast amounts of data scraped from the service to train their algorithms.

How users are to cope with this blackout is another question. For years, alternatives to Reddit have failed to take off.

Will someone emerge to turn this crisis into a very lucrative opportunity?