Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also most people don’t really care about the API/3rd party app thing. It doesn’t impact them and it looks from the outside like a bunch of dorks with no lives getting worked up over nothing. I’ve been on Reddit since the digg migration and I’ve never felt the need for an app, old.reddit.com and Adblock works perfectly fine on the phone. Better than Reddit’s mobile site.
It doesn't affect them directly , but the moderation tools a lot of subreddits need are built into third-party apps because Reddit refuses to build mod tools itself, and when those stop working then the job of moderating large and active subreddits will become vastly more cumbersome and frustrating, and far less efficient. Maybe this issue only affects 0.1% of users, but those 0.1% of users do a lot for the site that…
I made one comment on an anti-parent hate subreddit to try and explain why I thought they were wrong to automatically hate people for having kids, and then the subreddit for new parents automatically banned me. I tried to ask the mods on the subreddit for parents to unban me, and they muted me, and then Reddit gave me a temporary ban from the entire site for "harassment" of the mods
So far as I'm concerned, I'm happy to see the end of the little pocket dictator mods and the admins/Spez. It'll be a lot nicer if I can keep completely separate throwaway identities for talking about diapers and talking about philosphy