Thousands of Reddit discussion forums have gone dark this week to protest a new policy that will charge some third-party apps to access data on the site, leading to worries about content moderation and accessibility.

“Reddit is killing third-party applications (and itself)," multiple subreddits wrote in posts seen on the platform's homepage this week.

The new fees are part of broader changes to Reddit's API, or application programming interface, that the company announced recently.

It's pretty easy to piss people off on Reddit. Less so to piss off seemingly everyone on the platform.

Still, Reddit’s management has succeeded in doing just that as it weathers protests over its decision to charge for access to its API. That ruling risks putting the company in a death spiral as users revolt, the most dedicated community caretakers quit, and the vibrant discussions move to other platforms.

A number of popular subreddits restricted users from accessing information from June 12-14 as a form of protest against Reddit's new policies that they say are severely hampering third-party apps. 

A subreddit is a topic-specific community on the website Reddit. 

Subreddits range from broad topics such as "r/WorldNews" to more niche interests, such as specific sports teams, locations or hobbies.

Hundreds of Twitter Inc employees are estimated to have decided to quit the beleaguered social media company following a Thursday deadline from new owner Elon Musk that staffers sign up for "long hours at high intensity," or leave.

The departures highlight the reluctance of some of Twitter's 3,000 or so employees to remain at a company where Musk earlier fired half of the workforce including top management, and is ruthlessly changing the culture to emphasize long hours and an intense pace.

Hundreds of employees at Twitter have reportedly decided to resign from the company after CEO Elon Musk demanded that in order to stay at the company they would need to commit to “extremely hardcore” working conditions.

The New York Times reported that the company was in disarray Thursday afternoon as the deadline approached as “hundreds of Twitter employees appeared to have decided to depart with three months of severance pay.”

Elon Musk sent a flurry of emails to Twitter employees on Friday morning with a plea.

“Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 p.m. today,” he wrote in a two-paragraph message, which was viewed by The New York Times. “Thanks, Elon.”

About 30 minutes later, Mr. Musk sent another email saying he wanted to learn about Twitter’s “tech stack,” a term used to describe a company’s software and related systems. Then in another email, he asked some people to fly to Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to meet in person.

Social media platforms have flooded users’ feeds with claims that undermine the integrity of U.S. elections since 2020.

Now, about a month before the midterm elections, conspiracy theorists and election-fraud peddlers are pushing claims that the arrest of an election software company CEO is proof that their many debunked claims were true.

A worker carries ballots at a Los Angeles County Registrar processing center on Nov. 5, 2020. Photo by Keith Birmingham via Getty Images.