Man....I remember when reddit was fun.
A while ago, I was moderator for a small community of subreddits and decided that the leadership shenanigans had gotten to me, so I left all those subs behind and just became a lurker. Nothing reddit leadership has done has made me regret that choice.
But it's sad, anybody remember Team Periwinkle? Cake day? Getting trophies? Reddit used to distribute their source code, and have real hackers running it. Now it's just another shitty business model looking to be exploited. I get it, Reddit isn't a charity and isn't free to run, it is a business, but now it's just going to be a shit one.
You know what would have still sucked but still ended up working?
"Hey 3rd party app makers, you're part of the Reddit community. Running this site and service is expensive, so here's what's going to happen. In 12 months we're going to be reworking our revenue model and it will impact how you connect to us. Let's start to chat about it now and decide what's best for this part of our community.
Be prepared, we're going to have to figure out how to make money but we want you to be part of the solution. Anything is on the table but here's what we're thinking today:
1. Limit free API access to a cap per day - easier to implement, but will not create revenue for anybody and will cause us to have to build anti-abuse systems.
2. Run more ads. We think we'd probably have to figure out a way for your apps to be part of our ad network. So possible terms of service (TOS) for you might be that you'll have to pass ads through according to some yet to be decided display standard. You won't get any money from it, and it might make your user experience worse. We might consider extending our TOS to also let you run ads in your own apps and mix them in with ours. It's your app, and it would be your decision.
3. Charge for API access. We want to target making $x/million API calls. You would have to figure out how to pay for this. One options is to charge your users a monthly fee and pass it through. Our experience say that while this would reduce your user count, it would also reduce your support load. We'd be open to letting you charge $x+y/million and you keep the $y or perhaps we charge some fee like $x+y and you keep z% percent. On our free site we'd probably still run ads, which would encourage users to your apps for a "premium" experience. There's several models here and we haven't decided yet -- but it could be win-win for everybody who acts as a "portal" into our service. As a show of good faith, we'd probably kill our own organic mobile app to further let you differentiate yours.
4. Some mix of the above, maybe with tiers.
Contact us, we're going to start setting up discussions for the next 2-3 months, make a decision within 6, and then give you 6 months to modify your apps and work out payment methods and so on."