We laugh but this does an excellent point of underscoring the whole power dynamic in Reddit.
Who normally keeps these subs on message, and controls content? The mods.
The mods are volunteers that curate the content of Reddit. And Reddit did a shit job by getting into a pissing contest with their own best assets.
If they had charged API fees such that 3rd party apps would have had to charge a monthly fee to users....I would have probably just paid. And I know I'm not the only one.
But they priced it intentionally to kill 3rd party apps, because they wanted to channel access through their garbage app with its "promoted" ads all over the place.
It's not about "free vs. not free" it's about intentionally killing off the applications that made reddit likeable as a platform.
See I keep telling myself that I will put that hardware to good use, but never do. And that is why I end up with a hoard of 5+ year old hardware in the basement or closet…
This is why everything you hear from pop-evolution theories in sociology is likely bs.
“Women like shopping because they used to be gatherers” or other such garbage.
It’s all trying to simplify human behaviour based on half-baked knowledge of the past, and to pass it off as scientific insight. It’s not much different than the pseudoscience used to fuel racism 100 years ago.
Human behaviour is complex. And even though our societies are more complex now than 10000 years ago, it doesn’t mean people back then were simple.