On the official blog today, Reddit – one of the Internet’s most popular news aggregators – has announced that, on January 18, they’ll be shutting down their service for 12 hours in protest of SOPA.

Reddit Brave

We wouldn’t do this if we didn’t believe this legislation and the forces behind it were a serious threat to Reddit and the Internet as we know it. Blacking out Reddit is a hard choice, but we feel focusing on a day of action is the best way we can amplify the voice of the community.

This is a bold move, one that I hope to see Facebook, Twitter and Google replicating. While Reddit is a huge site with hundreds of thousands of regular visitors a day (34,879,881 unique visitors in December 2011), preaching against SOPA on Reddit is a little bit like preaching to the choir. For a thing like this to have any major effect, I think the major players need to close down their service and get people to notice.

Little under a month ago, Reddit led a large boycott against GoDaddy, which finally forced the company to back down on its original position and claim that it would no longer support SOPA. The community is large, vocal, strong and powerful, but I’m afraid that this won’t be enough.

Still, somebody has to go first, right? Somebody has to be the first to announce that they’ll be doing this. I’d like to take the opportunity to add CSICON to the list. We’ll also be closing down the page On January 18th from 8am–8pm EST (1300–0100 UTC).