Ad networks fudged the numbers for many years, free just isn't as viable as thought. I don't mind paying - either for a service or for server costs of hosting

Ad networks fudged the numbers for many years, free just isn't as viable as thought. I don't mind paying - either for a service or for server costs of hosting my own instance or whatever - and I certainly don't mind paying reddit specifically. However the price point, putting it on developers and not regular users so they thought users wouldn't be bothered (I guess they assumed apps like Apollo would pass it on to their users and appear to be the bad guy? It's the only way I can make any sense of how they did it) is pretty shitty. But the worst part is killing off all these tools that mods require - that second order effect will likely kill Reddit. The only other time I could see a company make a decision that would so clearly kill a product was the facebook algorithmic feed, though admittedly that did take 10 years.