Today’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday (#SoCS) is “site/sight”. I was immediately reminded of the Reddit blackout. For those not on Reddit, this was started in the blindness subreddit (or so I believe) as a protest to third-party apps to access Reddit being charged enormous fees in order to use Reddit’s API. This would, or so I’m led to believe, essentially render third-party Reddit clients unable to continue as of July 1.
What does blindness or sight have to do with this? Well, the Reddit app is particularly inaccessible with VoiceOver, unlike some third-party apps. While the Reddit site is slightly more useable than its mobile app, it’s still not fully accessible. The fact that third-party apps will most likely be going out of business as of July 1, means that those without sight will no longer be able to access the Reddit app.
While R/Blind is back online, many subreddits are protesting indefinitely by having gone private and disabled posting. This gives me the idea that more is at stake than just the blind community.
I joined Reddit less than three months ago, but I’m pretty sure I’ll have to let go of yet another social networking platform. Oh wait, I can technically still use Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, the latter of which I do still use for its groups, but I prefer not to. I’m glad I still have WordPress, although I wonder for how long.
A Multitude of Musings 
Yeah, I use Reddit quite a bit myself and it’s sad to see this, although I’m clinging to hope, because I’ve seen that the developer of the iPhone app Dystopia is still willing to fight for keeping his app alive and apparently is the only one or one of very few third-party app developers who has managed to reach some kind of consensus with Reddit. Still, it really sucks that it has to be like this, and it’s definitely not only the blind that are discriminated against, apparently a lot of subreddit moderators find it a lot easier to do their job using third-party apps, and even average users don’t always fancy being tracked and hit with ads by Reddit all the time.
I guess I would only worry about WordPress if you use some other app to blog, like I use MarsEdit for example because I refuse to waste my time on learning the block editor unless they literally force me to. That’s always a risk that they might close their API or something and render such apps useless, but if you use the website or the mobile app I guess it’s not so likely that they’d just make it inaccessible, because unlike Reddit or Twitter, WordPress appears to have an accessibility team.
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I hope you’re right about Dystopia being exempt from the API fee. Not that I’ve ever used it, because it’s in beta.
As for WordPress, I use the website. I do rely on the classic editor though, although if I really need to I think I could use the block editor.
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