Thousands of Reddit forums are going dark this week. Here's why.

Reddit is seeing thousands of its communities go dark this week in protest against upcoming policy changes by the social networking company aimed at making money from its vast trove of data.

Starting next month, the unpopular policy would start charging third-party developers for use of Reddit's application programming interface, or API, which is currently free. to mine data then used to develop community moderation tools and build apps that enable users to interact with the website's content through more seamless interfaces. 

But, that could change when Reddit begins monetizing its API next month. The social network will charge for high-volume data requests, prompting popular developers who can't or won't comply with the platform's new pricing model to shut down third-party apps and stop developing tools that some Redditors say improve the user experience on the platform.