Reddit even already treats ads as a post type (hence the karma and comments on ads). All they had to do was say "you must show our ads" and if they caught a major app filtering out ads, block their API keys.

I don't even think paying an API licensing key is that unreasonable. In fact it's quite common. But the price they're asking is completely absurd and doesn't scale appropriately. They also didn't give app developers time to assess and discuss the pricing before implementation started.

There were SO MANY ways to handle this better, that would have been more profitable for them, and would have left people feeling more good about that things were being handled in a reasonable way. This decision making process screams of hubris. I've said it a couple of places, but it gives the impression that Reddit fundamentally doesn't understand reddit. Reddit's greatest value is ease of community creation and curation. Many of the decisions they've made since rolling out New Reddit have stood to restrict and inhibit this core interaction.

I genuinely wonder how Spez et al view reddit. What do they think the point is? What do they think people are there for?

I was the ultimate freeloader/user. I used reddit nearly everyday for 13 years, never once bought premium or any reddit gold or any sort of rewards and blocked every ad.

They definately could have forced me to pay a subscription or something somehow without just completely shuting down how I browse the site.

It's so utterly bizarre and stupid.