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by rpd9803 1106 days ago
i mean I guess Spez started it by trying to monetize the API, unless you meant who started the idea of a blackout as a reaction to that, in which case Im not sure.
1 comments

That’s not a fair characterization of the problem.

It’s been known for a while that Reddit was planning to monetize their API, and that was never an issue.

The issue was the incredibly high pricing of the API (which would cost some external apps $20 million a year) combined with a surprisingly short-notice notification.

This combination is what made it impossible for third-party apps to adopt, forcing them to make the decision to shut down instead.

Where has it been known? They told the Apollo dev in Jan/Feb of this year that there were going to be no big API changes this year.