I find many of the replies here fascinating. On one hand whenever there is talk about government regulating some industry or actor a large portion of commenter here reply that if you don't agree with the practice don't use them, no regulation needed. Now an organisation does exactly that, they decide that they don't want to use a "service" that they ethically disagree with, and lots of replies call it pointless virtue signalling. So how should people/organisations act when they disagree with certain practices/actors?
People like to be contrarian, or at least the replies a thread receives will mostly be from people who disagree with the thread's premise.
2) Building and maintaining an API is as rent seeking as building any kind of subscription service, I don’t see the issue.
3) Why would you pay a volunteer? They’re volunteering. In exchange they wield incredible power over the community, which is the real reason they volunteer.
4) The UX sucks, but there’s still old.reddit.com, so you have options.
5) What additional value can be provided? It’s a giant forum and people post comments, there’s not much more you need, that is the value.
Third party apps can just raise their fees and users will pay a couple more dollars. But it’s not about money, it’s about power. Reddit users are very entitled and care more about optics. They don’t want to surrender a fist full of dollars for a website they use everyday and probably are addicted to.
Providing a per app, per user API key would be the most sustainable way of doing business with 3rd party app developers while keeping users that are willing to pay happy. Plenty of the users that use 3rd party apps already pay something to use them, so it's not out of the question that they would be willing to pay even more to keep using them. I know I would.