I’ve been a long time Redditor and an Apollo user for about a year. I even paid for it. The main draw for me was the lack of advertising. In the back of my head I kept thinking that it couldn’t last. Reddit is losing revenue from the lack of advertising views. It didn’t
To me, Reddit’s sky high pricing for the use of the API is intended to kill off apps like Apollo and for its users to move to the advertising filled web site or its own app, which I’ve never used.
If Huffman came out and said this was a revenue move right off would everyone be as upset as they are? Are people upset because Huffman completely mishandled the move or because they got their ad free experience turned off? If Reddit had an app the same quality as Apollo only with ads, would they be OK with it. I’ve only used Apollo so I can’t speak to the other apps.
I can’t blame Reddit for wanting to make money. It doesn’t make a profit. Investors have to keep pouring in money to keep it going. They’re going to want to see a return on their investment at some point. Usually they cash in on an IPO, but IPO’s are generally only successful if the corporation looks like it will be profitable or at least the stock price continues to go up. That’s how capitalism works.
In my case, I probably would have left regardless. I can’t stand adds in my feed. I probably wouldn’t have heard of lemmy or kbin if there hadn’t been such an uproar. So I’m glad it went the way it did.
I think it is within the company’s right to revenue increasing opportunities. That said I view the slandering of the Apollo creator as the turning point. It was very poor taste and their communication around this has been horrendous. It kick started the migration to the fediverse and a critical mass has adopted it. So now there is no good reason to go back to Reddit even if they reverse their decisions. Heck, had there been a different stimulant to fediverse adoption without any missteps from Reddit, I would still have transitioned my usage to a system where the users are more in control.
No one really has an issue with Reddit charging for API access. It’s the insane amount they’re asking for, the small window of time they gave devs to require monetization, and the fact that the API would no longer provide all content that is the problem.
The stuff you mention is bad too, but it’s hardly the first issue here
If it wasn’t for the amount being much higher than most other companies charge, and what it costs Reddit itself to do the same, and a 30-day timeframe with which to get around those changes on top of it, I think that they would have been much better received. The third-party app developers didn’t any problems with paying for things like Imgur APIs, and would have happily paid up for Reddit’s, if they had the time to implement it, and didn’t have to deal with the exorbitant cost.
However, I do think that Spez made things much, much worse. If Reddit didn’t make a discussion, and just put out the announcement, people would have shrugged, and moved on. His AMA, and everything else after was just throwing fuel onto the fire, which was further boosted by Reddit admins suddenly wading into the fray, something that they had not done previously, even rom the perspective of moderator tyranny. The previous response tended to always be “we’re sorry to hear that, but you can just go and create your own community if you have an issue with them”, unless the problem was bad enough it got press attention.
Like others have said, there are multiple factors at play:
The official reddit app sucks in terms of basic usability
The offiical reddit app has poor accessibility
The official website, while generally well optimised for mobile, keeps forcing users to use the reddit app - see point 1
Reddit is trying to position themselves as an ad company (see here for one user’s explanation), so it’s in their benefit to get people using the mobile version where they can hoover up sensitive information for serving ads.
Reddit are trying to grow their ad platform. Third party apps interfere with that. Reddit understandably wants to kill them off.
Reddit are aware that people like third party apps and people don’t like their official app.
Now, if Reddit had been honest and transparent throughout the entire process and just killed off the APIs without charging for it and gave the straightforward explanation, I think people would be sad as they are emotionally invested in their apps, and there would be some people who would go for good. But a lot more people would come back to Reddit - let alone seek alternatives like Lemmy, KBin, Tildes, etc.
What has happened is that the CEO has tried to make apps “the villain” and reddit the “poor little company” - sort of like DARVO but for 3rd party apps, so they could paint their official Reddit as the “wholesome” one.
Except the reddit community is large and pretty smart - technically and legally too. Receipts were kept, the CEO was exposed for his blatant lies, and then he has become incredibly unhinged and angry that things haven’t gone his way, giving incredibly aggressive interviews. And the Reddit community notices, because whenever Reddit is in the news, it’s very rarely for a good reason. The CEO was shown to be wearning no clothes after all.
I’ve seen Reddit go through drama, but never quite like this. It’s quite incredible and astonishing how one person could fuck up a transition this badly. Spez has repeated that the Automod is going to be killed, but given the blatant lies that came before, it’s no wonder why folks aren’t trusting him on his word. He’s made his bed, he has to lie in it.
If Huffman came out and said this was a revenue move right off would everyone be as upset as they are? Are people upset because Huffman completely mishandled the move or because they got their ad free experience turned off? If Reddit had an app the same quality as Apollo only with ads, would they be OK with it. I’ve only used Apollo so I can’t speak to the other apps.
The initial spark definitely came from Reddit’s clear backstabbing of 3rd party developers with the API change. There was no attempt to work with developers, just to remove them indirectly.
This being particularly bad when 3rd party developers were basically holding up most power-users, most moderators, and basically anybody who actually needed accessibility features (seems like Reddit’s never heard of blind people by the way they made their app).
When you combine that with the catastrophic mishandling of the situation with that incredibly awkward AMA, the internal leaks, and the accusations towards Apollo Dev, it made it incredibly obvious that Reddit wasn’t acting in good faith…
That’s really what started the shit storm that’s still raging now with the blackouts, subs and mods being blackmailed, subs converting to NSFW, the John Oliver stuff. It’s all because of how badly Reddit mishandled the situation. It’s almost like they forgot their website is mostly ran by the same volunteers they were screwing over.
However, I think you are right to an extent that if Reddit had taken the time to add accessibility and moderation features into their apps, and just improved the interface in general instead of just focusing on sucking the most money and telemetry out of their audience possible, then things would never have advanced as far as they did…
But I also think that’s one mighty big “what if” because if they would have had the foresight to do any of that, they would’ve had the foresight to not mishandle everything else as badly as they did either.
If this had been handled differently, Huffman could have even won the support of redditors to help make the platform profitable.
I’m sure most reasonable people believe Reddit should be able to pay its bills so that we can have it as a resource. Spez just came out of the gate pissing everyone off and then doubled down at every opportunity to explain the move.
Two things would have done it for me. They could have offered a user token subscription that I could port to all my accounts. Sure there could be token sharing with that method, but for a “modest” user cost, I might have been tolerable of it. They would have had to open the third party apps at the same time, but it would have bought time. The second thing would have been extending advertising through the third party app. That might discourage users of the free third party app, but it would also have given time to readjust the market price. Maybe the compromise would be that the free app could still be free of Reddit ads, but it wouldn’t be customizable or would be limited in the number of additional subreddits with certain ones that were fixed to those free accounts. The key in both cases would be to work at making Reddit still available to those third party apps via the API and not the way it was brought to those developers. Lose the third party support, lose the support of moderators who have learned to be efficient with their way of using the site, lose the site.
While essentially killing off 3rd party apps is disappointing, I could’ve understood and been willing to switch to the official app and maybe even pay monthly for no ads and more features.
What made me leave is how poorly Huffman and the company treated the developers, moderators, and users.
For developers:
Reddit went back on their word about no API cost changes this year
Lied about making the API cost reasonable
Gave developers very little time to adjust
Treated developers and their apps as freeloaders instead of as a source of growth for Reddit when they didn’t even have an app yet
Blatantly slandered Apollo’s developer
For moderators:
Reddit treated moderators as if their input didn’t matter despite providing free labor for the site
Framed them as being power hungry for disagreeing and protesting Reddit’s decisions
For users:
Reddit treated users as if their input didn’t matter despite Reddit being a user-generated content site
Treated their contributions to the site as Reddit’s property, not their own
Essentially said users are just a bunch of whiney babies who are powerless, have no willpower, and will visit the site no matter what we do
Also, even besides Huffman showing his true colors as being a total asshole, it just makes Reddit’s poor leadership SO evident. How do you become such a popular site with free content and free moderators, and still can’t make money? How do you manage to turn a great Reddit third-party app into a buggy mess of an official app? Why are you constantly prioritizing what you think users want instead of just listening to them? And now you essentially just told all of us: “fuck you, I own you and your content, and I am entitled to to make money off of you.”
And to pile on top, Reddit has been around since 2005. Why is there a SUDDEN and sloppy push towards profitability? It’s like someone clued them in just recently that an IPO means you’ll have to publicly show profit/loss. The way they’ve gone about it suddenly and sloppily doesn’t scream long term plan, but instead a crash change.
If you are to believe that Reddit is setting the API pricing as high as proposed to eliminate 3rd party apps, rather than to recoup costs of allowing their existence (which I wouldn’t put it past them to lie like that to make it sound more palletteable), then it’s reasonable to believe Apollo’s existence doesn’t cost them 20M$. In fact I’d be surprised if it even costs them the 10M$ figure because Reddit’s reaction implies a number that high must be extortion.
Didn’t they buy alien blue before that?
It was the most popular, before Apollo even existed I think.
They bought that, turned it to shit despite it starting from a beloved, yet now unrecognizable mess.
Even if they bought Apollo, RIF, Relay, Sync and Baconreader tomorrow, their goal with the site conflicts with what people enjoy about using it and anything they do will be shittier and shittier.
People would always flock to another community focused app as long as that’s a possibility, so they decided to nuke the whole concept.
they hurt themselves here though because Apollo’s dev gave them the buyout option and they said he was trying to extort them. I doubt any of the app developers would be too keen on this now without covering their ass to pretty extreme extents
From a game theory of greedy agents point of view, what is the number value of a worthless app? As in, if Reddit offered to buy Apollo for $1 right now, what greedy reason would there be to refuse?
Nobody is against them making money, but personally it was just the iicong omn the cake. The censorship was my biggest issue, then they started requiring emails, etc…losing my apps and then threatening mods was it.
I’m not entirely sure why Reddit was going to charge outlandish fees for the third-party APIs. Looks like none of the apps are actually going to pay them, so he’s not getting anything out of it. It’s really a combination of pushing them out of the market and then being a smug little bitch that really nailed it in the coffin for a lot of people.
Looks like none of the apps are actually going to pay them, so he’s not getting anything out of it.
But that is exactly what his goal was. If he really was interested in working with the 3PA devs, this would have been handled completely differently. The fact that it was handled as it was, with essentially zero engagement between the company and the community, and with essentially zero flexibility on the part of the company on the implementation, is pretty clear evidence that their goal all along was to drive the 3PA’s out of business.
Every user they lose they’ll replace with 10 bots.
This isn’t about longterm thinking, this is a push to control how many “users” they can put on their IPO docs. Steve and the current board (VC monies) are going to cash out and what happens to Reddit after the IPO is the least of their worries.
Every fewer third-party app is one fewer datum that they are lying about the number of real, fleshy users. This has nothing to do with AI training or APIs or anything but legitimizing bot activity to pump up the numbers.
Facebook and google have been selling ad “impressions” to people of questionable realness for decades at this point.
i don’t think they were trying to make money off of the API changes. like others are saying, it has to do with AI and they figured they might as well take the chance and knock out 3rd party in the same swoop so that they can funnel more people onto the official app
of course, but they wanted to kill 3rd party apps without explicitly saying “we’re killing 3rd party apps”
this way they can (or at least they thought they could have) had plausible deniability saying stuff like “we tried to work with them” and this is essentially what they tried in the first couple of days
I feel like AI being the reason doesn’t hold up particularly well from a technical standpoint. From my searching, web-scraping is completely legal. It’d be slower, but a massive dataset is still very collectable.
Plus building a web-scraper is so easy now. Funny enough, generative AI like chat gpt can get you like 95% of the way there in just a few minutes.
Though, none of the reasons they’ve stated so far seem to hold up to scrutiny.
It’s slower, but to use an API requires you to customize your system to use each different sites unique API. It would be a massive development undertaking, for such a small benefit that it would never pay off. For an LLM, you only need to read each page once, you just wait til a post is a month or so old, and essentially all discussion has stopped, and you will get everything you need. So “fast” isn’t really a concern at all.
I personally would be a paying subscriber to Apollo right now if Reddit had announced they were going to charge a reasonable amount of money for the API. I totally understand how a massive website like that and all the servers and storage required must have cost a fortune. Paying to avoid ads is cool with me… cutting off my access to the best way to use Reddit is not.
If their official app and “new” reddit layout ain’t shit there won’t be so many users using paid 3rd party apps to begin with. Fix your product instead of force killing competitors.
At the current price he wants? Yes. Because it would still represent an attempt to kill off all third party apps. Reddit wants to look like the good guys in having a price structure, but it is a transparent bit of trickery. Because the whole thing isn’t about API costs to Reddit, but gathering all the data to sell about its users and to push ads. Reddit is attempting an IPO. And shareholders will demand a path to profitability, unlike Silicon Valley investors.
Would honesty and transparency made the protests smaller? On some fronts yes. But many Reddit users would have been pissed with the model they want to use (facebook). So maybe the protests still would have been as widespread. But we could have skipped the whole, “Reddit CEO disrespecting unpaid mods and Reddit users” phase.
I definitely wouldn’t be as upset as I am right now. I would consider paying to be able to continue to use the service.
However, right now, I wouldn’t come back to Reddit even if they called of the whole thing and decided to leave free access to the API. I have zero trust in Reddit after all that happened. To be honest I’m kinda glad it all went down like this. At least we got to know their real colors.
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I think it is within the company’s right to revenue increasing opportunities. That said I view the slandering of the Apollo creator as the turning point. It was very poor taste and their communication around this has been horrendous. It kick started the migration to the fediverse and a critical mass has adopted it. So now there is no good reason to go back to Reddit even if they reverse their decisions. Heck, had there been a different stimulant to fediverse adoption without any missteps from Reddit, I would still have transitioned my usage to a system where the users are more in control.
No one really has an issue with Reddit charging for API access. It’s the insane amount they’re asking for, the small window of time they gave devs to require monetization, and the fact that the API would no longer provide all content that is the problem.
The stuff you mention is bad too, but it’s hardly the first issue here
If it wasn’t for the amount being much higher than most other companies charge, and what it costs Reddit itself to do the same, and a 30-day timeframe with which to get around those changes on top of it, I think that they would have been much better received. The third-party app developers didn’t any problems with paying for things like Imgur APIs, and would have happily paid up for Reddit’s, if they had the time to implement it, and didn’t have to deal with the exorbitant cost.
However, I do think that Spez made things much, much worse. If Reddit didn’t make a discussion, and just put out the announcement, people would have shrugged, and moved on. His AMA, and everything else after was just throwing fuel onto the fire, which was further boosted by Reddit admins suddenly wading into the fray, something that they had not done previously, even rom the perspective of moderator tyranny. The previous response tended to always be “we’re sorry to hear that, but you can just go and create your own community if you have an issue with them”, unless the problem was bad enough it got press attention.
deleted by creator
Like others have said, there are multiple factors at play:
Now, if Reddit had been honest and transparent throughout the entire process and just killed off the APIs without charging for it and gave the straightforward explanation, I think people would be sad as they are emotionally invested in their apps, and there would be some people who would go for good. But a lot more people would come back to Reddit - let alone seek alternatives like Lemmy, KBin, Tildes, etc.
What has happened is that the CEO has tried to make apps “the villain” and reddit the “poor little company” - sort of like DARVO but for 3rd party apps, so they could paint their official Reddit as the “wholesome” one.
Except the reddit community is large and pretty smart - technically and legally too. Receipts were kept, the CEO was exposed for his blatant lies, and then he has become incredibly unhinged and angry that things haven’t gone his way, giving incredibly aggressive interviews. And the Reddit community notices, because whenever Reddit is in the news, it’s very rarely for a good reason. The CEO was shown to be wearning no clothes after all.
I’ve seen Reddit go through drama, but never quite like this. It’s quite incredible and astonishing how one person could fuck up a transition this badly. Spez has repeated that the Automod is going to be killed, but given the blatant lies that came before, it’s no wonder why folks aren’t trusting him on his word. He’s made his bed, he has to lie in it.
Reddit isn’t an ad company, reddit is a sock puppet company. They are selling the ability to control the narrative.
They seem to have failed miserably at controlling it
Or did they🧐
The initial spark definitely came from Reddit’s clear backstabbing of 3rd party developers with the API change. There was no attempt to work with developers, just to remove them indirectly.
This being particularly bad when 3rd party developers were basically holding up most power-users, most moderators, and basically anybody who actually needed accessibility features (seems like Reddit’s never heard of blind people by the way they made their app).
When you combine that with the catastrophic mishandling of the situation with that incredibly awkward AMA, the internal leaks, and the accusations towards Apollo Dev, it made it incredibly obvious that Reddit wasn’t acting in good faith…
That’s really what started the shit storm that’s still raging now with the blackouts, subs and mods being blackmailed, subs converting to NSFW, the John Oliver stuff. It’s all because of how badly Reddit mishandled the situation. It’s almost like they forgot their website is mostly ran by the same volunteers they were screwing over.
However, I think you are right to an extent that if Reddit had taken the time to add accessibility and moderation features into their apps, and just improved the interface in general instead of just focusing on sucking the most money and telemetry out of their audience possible, then things would never have advanced as far as they did…
But I also think that’s one mighty big “what if” because if they would have had the foresight to do any of that, they would’ve had the foresight to not mishandle everything else as badly as they did either.
If this had been handled differently, Huffman could have even won the support of redditors to help make the platform profitable.
I’m sure most reasonable people believe Reddit should be able to pay its bills so that we can have it as a resource. Spez just came out of the gate pissing everyone off and then doubled down at every opportunity to explain the move.
Two things would have done it for me. They could have offered a user token subscription that I could port to all my accounts. Sure there could be token sharing with that method, but for a “modest” user cost, I might have been tolerable of it. They would have had to open the third party apps at the same time, but it would have bought time. The second thing would have been extending advertising through the third party app. That might discourage users of the free third party app, but it would also have given time to readjust the market price. Maybe the compromise would be that the free app could still be free of Reddit ads, but it wouldn’t be customizable or would be limited in the number of additional subreddits with certain ones that were fixed to those free accounts. The key in both cases would be to work at making Reddit still available to those third party apps via the API and not the way it was brought to those developers. Lose the third party support, lose the support of moderators who have learned to be efficient with their way of using the site, lose the site.
While essentially killing off 3rd party apps is disappointing, I could’ve understood and been willing to switch to the official app and maybe even pay monthly for no ads and more features.
What made me leave is how poorly Huffman and the company treated the developers, moderators, and users.
For developers:
For moderators:
For users:
Also, even besides Huffman showing his true colors as being a total asshole, it just makes Reddit’s poor leadership SO evident. How do you become such a popular site with free content and free moderators, and still can’t make money? How do you manage to turn a great Reddit third-party app into a buggy mess of an official app? Why are you constantly prioritizing what you think users want instead of just listening to them? And now you essentially just told all of us: “fuck you, I own you and your content, and I am entitled to to make money off of you.”
And to pile on top, Reddit has been around since 2005. Why is there a SUDDEN and sloppy push towards profitability? It’s like someone clued them in just recently that an IPO means you’ll have to publicly show profit/loss. The way they’ve gone about it suddenly and sloppily doesn’t scream long term plan, but instead a crash change.
Excellently said! Can I nominate you to represent me in the fediverse?
If I put on my tinfoil hat, I think Reddit might have a long-term plan here.
Hike up the API price to a point where 3P apps like Apollo will have to shut down, making them worthless, after so much was invested in them
Get users upset with the lack of features on the official app
Make the 3P app developers look like bad guys
Wait a month or so
Publicly offer to buy a popular, and now worthless, 3P app ^for way too little money^, in order to use the features for the official app
Point out that the 3P dev is a monster if they don’t sell, since it would help users so much, and Reddit is a Community, after all
They couldnt do this because apollo dev already offered to sell apollo for 10m, half the cost it would have costed them for continued api usage.
The precedent is already there to buy one and reddit missed it.
If you are to believe that Reddit is setting the API pricing as high as proposed to eliminate 3rd party apps, rather than to recoup costs of allowing their existence (which I wouldn’t put it past them to lie like that to make it sound more palletteable), then it’s reasonable to believe Apollo’s existence doesn’t cost them 20M$. In fact I’d be surprised if it even costs them the 10M$ figure because Reddit’s reaction implies a number that high must be extortion.
Didn’t they buy alien blue before that?
It was the most popular, before Apollo even existed I think.
They bought that, turned it to shit despite it starting from a beloved, yet now unrecognizable mess. Even if they bought Apollo, RIF, Relay, Sync and Baconreader tomorrow, their goal with the site conflicts with what people enjoy about using it and anything they do will be shittier and shittier.
People would always flock to another community focused app as long as that’s a possibility, so they decided to nuke the whole concept.
Large corporations regularly buy up small firms to get their product. You may be less tin foil hatty than you think on that one.
they hurt themselves here though because Apollo’s dev gave them the buyout option and they said he was trying to extort them. I doubt any of the app developers would be too keen on this now without covering their ass to pretty extreme extents
From a game theory of greedy agents point of view, what is the number value of a worthless app? As in, if Reddit offered to buy Apollo for $1 right now, what greedy reason would there be to refuse?
“How can I trust you to even give me the $1 if you resort to slandering my character?”
Nobody is against them making money, but personally it was just the iicong omn the cake. The censorship was my biggest issue, then they started requiring emails, etc…losing my apps and then threatening mods was it.
I’m not entirely sure why Reddit was going to charge outlandish fees for the third-party APIs. Looks like none of the apps are actually going to pay them, so he’s not getting anything out of it. It’s really a combination of pushing them out of the market and then being a smug little bitch that really nailed it in the coffin for a lot of people.
But that is exactly what his goal was. If he really was interested in working with the 3PA devs, this would have been handled completely differently. The fact that it was handled as it was, with essentially zero engagement between the company and the community, and with essentially zero flexibility on the part of the company on the implementation, is pretty clear evidence that their goal all along was to drive the 3PA’s out of business.
They don’t want the developers to pay anything. They want the developers gone so that all the users are monetizeable through ads.
Every user they lose they’ll replace with 10 bots.
This isn’t about longterm thinking, this is a push to control how many “users” they can put on their IPO docs. Steve and the current board (VC monies) are going to cash out and what happens to Reddit after the IPO is the least of their worries.
Every fewer third-party app is one fewer datum that they are lying about the number of real, fleshy users. This has nothing to do with AI training or APIs or anything but legitimizing bot activity to pump up the numbers.
Facebook and google have been selling ad “impressions” to people of questionable realness for decades at this point.
i don’t think they were trying to make money off of the API changes. like others are saying, it has to do with AI and they figured they might as well take the chance and knock out 3rd party in the same swoop so that they can funnel more people onto the official app
they can data harvest much better that way
It would have been perfectly possible to charge a different rate for AI harvesting than for Reddit Apps.
of course, but they wanted to kill 3rd party apps without explicitly saying “we’re killing 3rd party apps”
this way they can (or at least they thought they could have) had plausible deniability saying stuff like “we tried to work with them” and this is essentially what they tried in the first couple of days
I feel like AI being the reason doesn’t hold up particularly well from a technical standpoint. From my searching, web-scraping is completely legal. It’d be slower, but a massive dataset is still very collectable.
Plus building a web-scraper is so easy now. Funny enough, generative AI like chat gpt can get you like 95% of the way there in just a few minutes.
Though, none of the reasons they’ve stated so far seem to hold up to scrutiny.
It’s slower, but to use an API requires you to customize your system to use each different sites unique API. It would be a massive development undertaking, for such a small benefit that it would never pay off. For an LLM, you only need to read each page once, you just wait til a post is a month or so old, and essentially all discussion has stopped, and you will get everything you need. So “fast” isn’t really a concern at all.
You can pull much more data much quicker through the API than some sort of HTML scraper. These LLMs need a lot of data and reddit is a big site.
AI has nothing to do with it other than a convenient, topical scapegoat.
I personally would be a paying subscriber to Apollo right now if Reddit had announced they were going to charge a reasonable amount of money for the API. I totally understand how a massive website like that and all the servers and storage required must have cost a fortune. Paying to avoid ads is cool with me… cutting off my access to the best way to use Reddit is not.
If their official app and “new” reddit layout ain’t shit there won’t be so many users using paid 3rd party apps to begin with. Fix your product instead of force killing competitors.
At the current price he wants? Yes. Because it would still represent an attempt to kill off all third party apps. Reddit wants to look like the good guys in having a price structure, but it is a transparent bit of trickery. Because the whole thing isn’t about API costs to Reddit, but gathering all the data to sell about its users and to push ads. Reddit is attempting an IPO. And shareholders will demand a path to profitability, unlike Silicon Valley investors.
Would honesty and transparency made the protests smaller? On some fronts yes. But many Reddit users would have been pissed with the model they want to use (facebook). So maybe the protests still would have been as widespread. But we could have skipped the whole, “Reddit CEO disrespecting unpaid mods and Reddit users” phase.
I have not heard anyone, other than articles trying to lead the narrative, say that it should be free.
It was always how much and how long they had to adapt.
Plus all the lies
Also the specific price they chose. Also the lack of regard for blind users
I definitely wouldn’t be as upset as I am right now. I would consider paying to be able to continue to use the service.
However, right now, I wouldn’t come back to Reddit even if they called of the whole thing and decided to leave free access to the API. I have zero trust in Reddit after all that happened. To be honest I’m kinda glad it all went down like this. At least we got to know their real colors.