It oozed bad faith. I'm surprised they didn't just say "API is dead, here's a new different product" if they were really eager to charge LLM scrapers the moon for training data, or kill apps.

I suspect someone in legal told them that would be a risk-- if they can't farm out accessibility issues on third party apps anymore, I could see them having ADA compliance issues.

It looks like they took the "constructive dismissal" model-- make it hostile enough that the "voluntarily" abandon the platform. Then it's not Reddit's fault all the apps left, and why they seemed to scramble to find a poster child "accessibility" app and give it a sweetheart deal, so they aren't completely exposed.