[bastawhiz]

Imagine if Google started charging for POP3 and IMAP access. Either use the official Gmail clients or pay ridiculous client costs.

Sure, there's no inherent right to free third party client access. And you can obviously switch to any service you want, or start your own. The point is that Reddit is taking away features and workflows from users which have been available for longer than most users have been on the service. Moreover, the cost is specifically being put on clients rather than users: you can't pay for Reddit through your favorite client, the client itself is being forced to pay.

If you've been using Gmail with Thunderbird exclusively for the last decade, and Mozilla is suddenly faced with paying a billion dollar API bill or shut down Gmail access, imagine how shitty that situation is for the end user.

[tremarley]

This is the best analogy I've seen so far.