WE HAD A GOOD THING YOU STUPID SON OF A BITCH!
We had 3PA's, we had all the free labor in the world, just from passionate people who wanted to share the things they love, we had bots to fight spam, and extremely talented developers who made your stupid website work on mobile. It all ran like clockwork, if you could have just shut your mouth we'd all be fine right now.
But no, you just had to blow it up. YOU, AND YOUR GREED AND YOUR EGO.
Edit: grammar
That's called the "fuck you" price. He knew how ridiculous that price was. He didn't negotiate with the 3rd party devs to try and find a solution that let's reddit earn a profit on API access and lets the devs earn a share for themselves. The whole thing was meant to burn the devs with the pipe dream that reddit could charge the ML/AI corps to train off our conversations. That horse left the barn 2 years ago.