Reddit never offered a chance for apps to pay; this became very clear during negotiations.
Mods left because a lot of moderator tools developed by moderators requires API access and Reddit was very slow to develop acceptable internal tools. At that point, a lot of mods got frustrated and left.
There’s a difference between rallying others to troll someone, and shutting down a subreddit you own. The mods weren’t forcing anyone to “participate”, they simply stopped providing a free service.
I was a 14-year Redditor that contributed both to them and app platforms. Nuked my account on principle because of how they decided to treat the community that built them. Nobody asked me to, I acted on my own discretion because it was (in my view) the right thing to do. Same reason I ditched Twitter.
The mods were acting on the same basis - they had supported a platform that made decisions they opposed. It wasn’t in service of anything other than doing the right thing.
AFAIK apps like Infinity are not paying anything because they’re currently considered “accessibility tools”, although I’m pretty sure they are still subject to a rate limit and a restriction on being able to view any posts labeled or mislabeled as NSFW.
As for the ones who aren’t exempt, I guess they’re reasonably comfortable with the position they’re in, personally I can’t say I’d be. One months notice to rugpull an entire API featureset? No thanks. Long prior notice, planned deprecation period are the industry standard, with extensions as necessary. Things work differently in FOSS, but Reddit is not a FOSS project.
I feel like Spez got upset Apollo was featured in the Apple ad and they weren’t.
If it was an app developer who precipitated it, so what? It had to be someone. That does not invalidate the choice of everyone else who participated in it. If you're going to hold an unpopular opinion, it should be a better one.
Taking a look at r/all one day, after many years of only seeing carefully-chosen subs that were actually good, was definitely one of the things that got me to finally quit.
This is the first unpopular opinion I’ve seen that’s truly an unpopular one. Through this lens, I’ve been a personal army for Victoria, people that think Alexis Ohanian is an idiot, people that think transparency to unpaid moderators is important, and people that think API pricing matters. I didn’t realize I was such a troll.
It looks like from your definition of “personal army” its impossible to perform any overt act or have any passive inaction and not be labeled someones “personal army”.
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