The landed gentry are only in charge until the king comes to town and chops off a few heads. At least that seems to be the case at Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman pretended his complaints about current moderators — who were protesting his decision to effectively cut off API access to tons of useful…
There was never any chance at a “fair price” as far as the vast majority of users were concerned. Basically any API cost is going to end up on the user side and the vast majority of users will immediately lose their shit… and then the app makers will redirect all of that to reddit. So the API costs are almost entirely for research and data scraping. This is why the app developers almost IMMEDIATELY turned this into a holy war and are just noping out the moment the bills come in.
But yeah. There is the “Oh, we’ll try to meet you in the middle and still make all apps unsustainable. Because we care” response that maybe involves some token contract work for one of the top app developers to improve the official app. And then there is the “Fuck all y’all addicts. Don’t like it? Not like you’ll do anything about it” response. And THAT is what has made me decide I don’t want to engage with reddit anymore.
Imgur has fair API prices and they serve images and video. Reddit serves goddamn text (or at least that’s their core business and if they can’t afford picture and video they shouldn’t do it).
Sure users would have had to pay some money and/or the 3rd party devs would have had to funnel some of their ad revenue to reddit. But if it was a reasonable amount, I doubt many people would have complained about it (there are always some). Everybody knows Reddit has to make money somehow.
This wasn’t designed to make money though. This was designed to kill all third party apps. I don’t even see the upside from a business perspective. This seems like a petulent manchild move by Spez, just like his idol Elon would make it…