Which begs the question why the hell they didn't work on getting the apps used for browsing Reddit to display ads? Just include them as posts like they do on the website, perhaps just with a label added. If the apps try to filter away the ads, revoke their API keys.
If users pay extra, omit the ads from the API. If companies want an entirely ad-free API, for training LLMS etc, they can pay extra.
This problem seems like something that could have so easily been avoided. I think I would happily pay a small monthly fee to keep an ad-free Apollo browsing experience, especially if it could be done in a way where the money was split between Reddit and Apollo. But.. they never even tried?
Yep, that's what Telegram did - there can be ads in public channels, they're clearly labeled as such in the API, and third-party clients must not filter them or will get their access revoked.
If reddit would pay subreddit moderators, top commenters, users that submit very interesting stuff, and in the case of Apollo, people creating the Apps that enable you to use Reddit in a pleasant way, then the story would be different.
Facebook moderation is especially awful, however. Pre-2022 (at least) a fairly common tactic against anti-Kremlin posts was to have the troll farm report the user and/or random posts of theirs in large amounts. Done! Many fought it out and got reinstated after several weeks, but some just gave up and quit Facebook in disgust.
(And that without mentioning the “Khokhlov” incident: “khokhol”, genitive plural “khokhlov”, is in addition to its literal meaning of “tuft” a fairly standard pejorative for Ukrainians; unfortunately for Facebook, it’s also the surname of physicist Aleksej Removich Khokhlov, presidential nominee and later vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which some years ago got several science-adjacent people and IIRC even a science monthly covering the election suspended for “hate speech”.)
Then Cambridge Analytica scooped up all the profile data of all of your friends when you completed a fun Buzzfeed style quiz and that created enough outrage to change it.
Whether Cambridge Analytica was actually able to make any use of this data to "subvert democracy" is very debatable. If you look into it, it's just how they marketed themselves.
People tend to like things they have, no matter how unreasonable. If you own a building where nobody lives, and I move in secretly and live there for five years, then you finally discover me and want me to get gone... good luck. Somehow I now have legal rights. I never paid you, did nothing for it, usually these people also completely trash the place (this is the part I don't get), yet you can't make me homeless on the spot.
We tend to feel entitled to things quickly, and reddit users (myself included) are used to just using the service via whatever third-party app. If reddit wants to change that, I'd like to get the opportunity to make it worthwhile for them to continue to support this.
Instead, it seems that the developer of the app I use needs to front these costs, and within a number of days (after being free for over a decade). My rational side tells myself that I have no reason to expect otherwise and that I should have questioned why this is all free in the first place. But I also don't like it and support any movement that aims to come to a different agreement with reddit. Surely if it was fine for many years, something can be worked out in the next months and enacted after a transition period.
It's not like reddit doesn't know how many people use reddit this way and that having them all pay a little bit for access is way beneficial as compared to cutting them off. What they're doing seems dumb from any angle that I can see and that's what makes me additionally support these protests. Talk to us, reddit.