Community Points allow members of Reddit communities to own a piece of their community, earn rewards for quality contributions, and unlock special features.
Read all about it at the above link. There's way too much to process here. This is going to be wild.
So this explains why they didn’t force Reddit premium for third party access. It was an obvious way to generate revenue, want API access become a premium user.
They had a whole new way of raising and paying out. Crazy.