Motivation + Reddit's handling of the situation has been the main driver of the negativity. Very few people took issue with the idea of Reddit charging commerci

Motivation + Reddit's handling of the situation has been the main driver of the negativity. Very few people took issue with the idea of Reddit charging commercial users of it's API. Reddit's initial announcement was that 3rd party apps were costing them money, that API access would be paid for soon™, and that NSFW content would no longer be available through the API. This raised immediate concerns from a few different groups. Moderators rely on free 3rd party tools to deal with a lack of functionality in Reddit's own, the removal of NSFW content from the API would cause issues even if the tools themselves were exempted. Visually impaired users rely on accessibility clients to deal with Reddit's poor experience with screen readers/magnification. Reddit scrambled to respond by stating there would be exemptions for non-commercial mod and accessibility tools. This dealt with some of the issues. 3rd party app developers then began shutting down and it was revealed that, in addition to removing NSFW content and exorbitant pricing, Reddit had given developers only 30 days to respond to the price changes. During all of this Reddit's CEO was openly, and privately, making disparaging comments about the userbase, 3rd party app developers, and moderators. Reddit's actions throughout have proved that their intention was to kill off the 3rd party applications and that, without community outrage, moderation and accessibility tools would have been collateral damage. It doesn't take a genius to comprehend that 30 days is not enough time for the 3rd party developers to transition their paying users to Reddit's new payment model, or that users would not have been willing to pay for a version with censored content.