Shit, all they had to do was offer the api to paid subscribers to use any 3rd-party app the user wanted. They could also offer two apis to developers - one that’s free with injected ads, and one that’s paid with no ads. Everybody wins, everybody gets “a piece of the pie.” But noooooo, they wanted it all-or-nothing.

Yeah they could have just moved the api costs down to the user level, charged like $3 a month, and while I would have bitched a bit, I would have just paid it and carried on. They just really handled this about as poorly as they could have.

There is some theory circulating that this is related to LLMs scraping reddit data. They say the absurd API pricing is B2B pricing targeting companies like Microsoft to use reddit as training data (not just threads but voting, voting habits, etc.)

Makes sense why so much stupidity and inability to get to a reasonable agreement with 3rd parties. Basically the logic is that if they left a lower pricing for 3rd parties, the big players would be much less eager to accept paying more.