Selig's willingness to actually pay for API prices, as long as reasonable, can be seen in his April/2023 post (archived link, original link). Ipsis digitis:
- "Offering an API is expensive, third party app users understandably cause a lot of server traffic"
- "My thoughts: I think if done well and done reasonably, this could be a positive change (but that's a big if). If Reddit provides a means for third party apps to have a stable, consistent, and future-looking relationship with Reddit that certainly has its advantages, and does not sound unreasonable, provided the pricing is reasonable."
We was willing to talk and surprisingly reasonable and comprehensive, given how poorly Reddit Inc. and spez treated him.
[Spez] His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally.
The interesting part in this, for me, is how Spez behaves a lot like the worst of the Reddit community: he's willing to distort words, in a hard-to-prove lie, to throw the whole discussion from events and facts into a finger-pointing shitfest.
[Selig] I could refute the "not providing value" part myself, but I will let Reddit argue with itself through statements they've made to me over the course of our calls:
Ouch. Does anyone have a Burn Heal?
I fully agree with Selig's point, by the way. The apps didn't add immediate profit to the site, but they certainly added value; it's just that Reddit Inc. was too incompetent to generate profit from that value.
["Reddit"?] No plans to change the API in 2023
If I had to take an educated guess, something changed within the company, that forced them to rush the IPO; in turn, this made them rush the API changes to kill ASAP the third party clients.
[Selig] Yearly users with time left on their subscription as of July 1st will automatically receive a pro-rated refund for the time remaining.
And he's still doing the right thing, refunding his customers for something clearly outside his control.
Reddit needs to learn to beware the nice ones.