Thousands of subreddits went dark after Reddit moved to shut down third-party apps.

The self-proclaimed “front page of the internet” is facing an ongoing battle with its users after its controversial announcement to scrap third-party apps on its platform, with thousands of Redditors going on strike for 48 hours.

Third-party apps like Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Sync, and Red Planet were the primary way of accessing Reddit instead of the Reddit official application. However, Reddit recently announced a pricing system for third-party application developers.

The charges to access Reddit’s Application Program Interface (API), which are now at 20 million, were deemed too much, and all four of the apps have said they are shutting down.

The backlash from the announcement has seen moderators of 3,489 subreddits closing off their forums in a 48-hour protest. Often times engaged Redditors use third party apps regularly and the move by reddit would be a big detriment.

“Developers who host dozens of critical bots for hundreds of major subreddits are threatening to pull the plug. Users with 10+ year histories are choosing to wipe their accounts rather than be associated with your company any more,” said one Redditor on a forum.

Reddit had explained its reasoning saying with its chief executive saying, “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidise commercial entities that require large-scale data use,” in a post on Friday. 

Reddit users typically access content by joining subreddits titled with a specific theme.

Users usually join a variety of subreddits and see posts from different areas of interest in their feeds. Unlike most social media, the application relies on moderators for these subreddits who can approve and remove posts. The current blackout effectively kills the platform for the intended two day long protest.

The blackout included five of the 10 most popular communities on the site – r/gaming, r/aww, r/Music, r/todayilearned and r/pics – which each have memberships of more than 30 million people.

Speaking to the BBC, a moderator added tha the protest was about “strength in numbers”.

“If it’s almost the entire website, would they destroy what they’ve built up in all these communities just to push through this highly unpopular change that both the mods and users of Reddit are overwhelmingly against?” he said.