This week, thousands of Reddit’s most popular communities went offline to protest the company’s move to start collecting fees for access to its API, or application programming interface. One listener called in to ask what all the fuss is about. We’ll get into it and answer more of your questions about how we keep track of consumer debt and the relationship between the underground economy and gross domestic product.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

• “Why are Reddit communities going private?” from Marketplace

• “Reddit goes dark” from Platformer

• “A developer says Reddit could charge him $20 million a year to keep his app working” from The Verge  

• “Reddit Wants to Get Paid for Helping to Teach Big A.I. Systems” from The New York Times

• “Twitter will make you pay to DM people who don’t follow you” from Mashable

• “Federal Reserve Board, Consumer Credit” from The Federal Reserve

• “Household Debt and Credit Report” from The Federal Reserve Bank of New York

• “Gross Domestic Product: An Economy’s All” from the International Monetary Fund

• “Underground Economy: Definition, Statistics, Trends, and Examples” from Investopedia

Got a question about the economy, business or technology for the hosts? Leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART or email us at makemesmart@marketplace.org.