Who curated them, rated them, sorted them, filtered them, and discussed them?

Not Reddit. They're just the landlord here.

And the landlords still have costs. It is not free to run a platform. They have to pay for it in one way or an other. Time of free beer have come to end.

People here should understand this more than anyone else. It is one thing to have site as hobby, but something with number of users is expensive to run.

Their hosting costs are not going to majorly change due to API access. By their own accounts, less than 5% of users access the site via the API and if anything, those would impose less costs than someone needing to load the entire UI alongside the API calls (albeit using a new GraphQL API that I’m sure is more efficient but not available to 3rd party apps).

API hosting is a drop in the bucket, even if their own accounts are to be believed wholesale.

It's not free to run a platform. But this is not about platform costs. This is about the standard pre-IPO juicing of the stats to maximize IPO pop, allowing insiders and VCs to sell shares and make bank. People here should understand this more than anyone else.

It takes a lot of optimism about lack of human greed to think that this is not the case, IMO.

I think it's not so much optimism as getting so blinded by the nominal, theoretical purpose that they don't pay attention to what people are actually doing. As they say, "follow the money". That'll tell you the difference between stated purpose and revealed purpose. "The purpose of the system is what it does."

It appears there's quite a severe disagreement over what those costs ought to be.

Perhaps if Reddit the company had been more disciplined over the last ten years, it wouldn't have come to that.

If you think this isn’t pre-IPO bullshit and is just “hey we have costs too!” I have multiple bridges to sell you

Yes and you rent the infrastructure needed to facilitate all those processes for millions of users.

You’re free to setup your own, or rent somewhere else. Regardless it costs money.

I didn’t rent anything. Over 14 years, I provided Reddit with content and worked for free as a moderator. In more recent times, I even paid $5.99/mo for a premium membership. Users like me and the communities that we helped build, are what Reddit is throwing away. It’s sad.

You built your dream castle in someone else's yard. You managed to get a bunch of visitors to come make the castle even better. The owner makes money on ads on the property so the more visitors the more income.

Now they want to charge for some aspect that was free and you decide not hang around anymore.

You say reddit is throwing it away when you are the one who is throwing it away because you have to pay if you want api access.

I already was paying. As mentioned in my comment, $5.99 a month.

The infrastructure costs next to nothing compared to what they're charging. There is a natural equilibrium point between communities, the landlord, the moderators, etc, and this clearly isn't it. Someone else will find it though.

The equilibrium is between what the market will pay and supply.

You forgot the most important part. Who actually created the content?