One of Spez’s answers in the infamous Reddit AMA struck me
Two things happened at the same time: the LLM explosion put all Reddit data use at the forefront, and our continuing efforts to reign in costs…
I am beginning to think all they wanted to do was getting their share of the AI pie, since we know Reddit’s data is one of the major datasets for training conversetional models. But they are such a bunch of bumbling fools, as well as being chronically understaffed, the whole thing exploded in their face. At this stage their only chance if survival may well be to be bought out by OpenAI…
They have been trying to be a public company, so they want to get the most profitability possible. Sure charging for ai modeling is great, they could have done special API keys for business use and for consumer use and charge appropriately, but they didn’t. They want users to use their app instead so they get tracking and ad revenue from those users, sure 3rd party users may quit, but some will just stay so long term they should get more profits.
That being said it sucks and I don’t agree with their decision and method. They also handled it unprofessionally especially from the CEO in my opinion.