Last year, all of Reddit went dark in protest of SOPA. It doesn’t look like the site will be doing it again for CISPA, but one of its more popular subreddits will.
The popular technology subreddit, which has almost 3 million readers, has gone dark today in protest of CISPA. It’s not like the subreddit has become unavailable, but rather the entire page, except for the ad, is now encased in a darkness that makes reading the links rather uncomfortable on the eyes.
The link at the top of the subreddit redirects users to a post on the Stand subreddit with information on what CISPA means for everyday Internet users. It also contains links to helpful tools that allow users to encrypt not just their Internet connections, but everything on their computer.
Out of all the other tech-related subreddits, it seems that /r/technology is the only one to have gone dark today. There are probably some other smaller subreddits that have also gone dark, but few have the amount of subscribers that /r/technology enjoys. Unfortunately, those who frequent /r/technology are probably already well aware of CISPA. It would have been far more effective for Reddit’s front page to go dark while providing a link to Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s video calling for action against CISPA.
Still, it’s nice to see at least one mainstream site go dark today in protest of CISPA. Anonymous called for an Internet blackout, but only managed to sign up a little over 400 Web sites. The Web sites that had signed up were not very well known either thus limiting the spread of the message.
UPDATE: Since publishing this story, a number of other popular subreddits have also gone dark in protest of CISPA. Most of the subreddits, including /r/pics, /r/funny, /r/politics, and /r/askreddit include the same link to the post on /r/stand at the top.
One popular subreddit has done something different though. The much loved (or much hated) /r/atheism has a banner protesting CISPA (click to enlarge):
