No one takes issue with Reddit’s desire to not just survive, but be profitable. The issue is in just how greedy and shortsighted they are about the core product, to the point where pushing third-party devs out into the cold was thought to be the best solution rather than embracing them.
Want those sweet ad impressions? Make it an optional part of the API with the incentive of devs getting a cut of the ad revenue served by their apps. There’s a hundred different, pro-consumer ways this could have gone that would have made everyone happy, and they chose the worst one. Then proved they didn’t understand the problem with this half-assed, completely boneheaded, tone-deaf AMA.
Time and again history has shown that platforms that embrace developers thrive, while the tech graveyard is littered with cautionary tales of those that don’t.