Budrul Chukrut | Lightrocket | Getty ImagesAt midnight on Tuesday, the moderators of the Reddit community r/Gaming decided to go dark.Dac Croach, who goes by username Dacvak, and the subreddit’s other leaders hit the private button, initiating a 48-hour shutdown for the group’s more than 37 million members, along with anyone else who tried to access the community.They were joining a large-scale protest against Reddit, which was about to implement a business change that would dramatically increase the price for third-party developers to use the company’s application programming interface, or API. In the preceding days, the r/Gaming moderators had run a poll indicating that users would support a shutdown. They discussed the results on Slack, and then went offline.The widespread protests of one of the internet’s most-trafficked sites started early this week and quickly expanded to more than 8,000 subreddits, including the wildly popular r/Funny, with over 40 million members, along with r/Music and r/Science, …
