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