My guesswork: It appears that the eng at reddit is so incompetent that they have newer, better, more efficient internal APIs available only to their house apps

My guesswork: It appears that the eng at reddit is so incompetent that they have newer, better, more efficient internal APIs available only to their house apps. So basically, the public APIs in question have both serious compute and eng costs that -- per a mod comment I can't find again -- are costing more than $10m annually. They can't amortize those costs across their first party apps as well, because those apps are on different APIs. They're looking -- again per a mod comment -- to make money on both the compute and eng costs for these APIs. Add to this some incredible stupidity, as they continue to underinvest in mod tools and appear not to realize -- though I really can't understand how they could not, since it's been a point of incredible contention with their mod community for many years -- how many mods, particularly those of the biggest forums, are using tools reliant on the current apis to effectively moderate. tl;dr: it's a big mess. They want to kill 3rd party front ends, and are unwilling to just say so; they continue to not build the tools mods need; they've lost trust with the mod community because of 10 years of lying about investing in mod tools; and they don't want to get everyone onto their internal APIs for reasons they haven't shared. Oh, and meanwhile, they're launching a new dev platform because... they think someone smart would want to build a business with them after this? I don't know.