Reddit blackout announcements: 2023 API protest

Starting June 12, 2023, many Reddit communities (subreddits) began a protest where they "went dark" - by changing to private mode - as a protest in response to Reddit's plans to change its API access policies and fee structure. Supporters of the protest criticize the planned changes for being prohibitively expensive for 3rd party apps. Beyond 3rd party apps, there is significant concern that the API changes are a move by the platform to increase monetization, degrade the user experience, and eventually kill off other custom features such as the old.reddit.com interface, the Reddit Enhancement Suite browser extension, and more. Additionally, there are concerns that the API changes will impede the ability of subreddit moderators (who are all unpaid users) to access tools to keep their communities on-topic and free of spam. This dataset includes the "stickied" posts that appeared on 5,351 subreddits on June 11, 2023 and June 12, 2023 - including many subreddits announcing their plans to participate in the protest. These posts were scraped using a custom Python script that was written specifically for this purpose. Ironically, the script uses the PRAW (Python Reddit API Wrapper) library, requiring a valid Reddit API key. Accordingly, after the platform's new API pricing policy went into effect, it is no longer feasible for researchers to perform this type of web scraping without external funding support.