You have to wonder if Reddit's profit model is based on selling advertising or selling the ability to control information distribution. The really poor search

You have to wonder if Reddit's profit model is based on selling advertising or selling the ability to control information distribution. The really poor search capability points to the latter being a big issue. If you can just write a good search query that retrieves relevant comments from posts, as well as the posts, then you can bypass the moderators and administrators, who tend to want to control the visibility of content according to their own agenda. Closing down the API would align with the latter agenda; look up the whole pushshift camas saga for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_data_api_update_changes_to_pushshift_access/ https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat...