Like many of us I’ve been using Reddit for a very long time (over 10 years) and am saddened by how much worse it’s got since the beginning. I also think they’ve greatly enshittified their default clients to push people to worse clients and hate that - they could have just given people a reason to want to use the new clients.

But I have an unpopular opinion: it’s totally ok, and I mean morally ok, for Reddit to charge for API access to this extent. 3rd party app usage incurs direct operational costs on Reddit, requires them to support an API with clients outside their control (and further, if a client uses the API inefficiently, Reddit has a lot more overhead in working to reduce that), and prevents supporting those efforts through advertising monetization. The actual API cost is not wholly unreasonable. Reddit shouldn’t be expected to work for free.

That is not to excuse all the other terrible dark patterns they’ve implemented. This wouldn’t even really be a problem at all if they had incentivized their own clients by making them better, what with all the funding and employees they have, and the ability to make backend changes to accommodate client changes. They’ve been using entirely “stick” tactics to encourage their crap clients instead of “carrot”. Even for people like me who don’t want to use the app at all, if they hadn’t made the default mobile web client (which I still use) so annoying and restrictive, probably Apollo would have much fewer users.

Basically, this is only a problem because they have given users no reason to use their official clients besides artificial annoyances