For those who aren't aware, people are mad at Reddit for charging money to make calls to their API. It was free, now it's not going to be free. Causes problems for 3rd party apps, but such is the nature of piggybacking off of a site that isn't yours.

What gets me is the "protest" planned where mods of several subs are planning to temporarily shutdown the subs on the 12th. Not just small subs. According to a post it includes several subs with hundreds of thousands to millions of subscribers.

Do the subscribers have a say in this? Nope. The subs they enjoy can just be disabled at a whim by a small group of mods with no oversight. If Reddit doesn't see how silly the mod issue at that point, it honestly deserves to fail.

Also, to touch on the pricing, here's a quote:

Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I'd be in the red every month.

So, people are complaining that the API change will kill 3rd party apps, but 3rd party apps can survive on a paid model of something around $5/month. Unless I'm missing something, if people really valued these apps, I don't see how it would be hard to just keep them running on a paid subscription model that's still relatively cheap.

Reddit just isn't valuable enough to the people who complain the loudest, which is the weirdest part. Kids are dropping hundreds of dollars on video game loot but Redditors don't want to pay a single dime for anything they claim to love. Same issue with Youtube.