So long as they can pocket a few hundred milion from the IPO, Reddit management couldn’t give a monkey’s about any of their milions of users or the thousands of communities that made Reddit valuable in the first place. They are quite happily flushing all that down the toilet to get their big pay day. Why didn’t they just go non-profit like Wikipedia? That’s the only business model that makes sense for Reddit and is sustainable. But then nobody gets to become a multi millionaire, and we can all see which would be the bigger tragedy for u/spez.

But has no plans to pay its posters, commenters and mods.

It’s never been about the API. Third party apps are undercutting Reddit’s as revenue. They could never ban the apps outright so they set an obscene cost for API calls to indirectly kill them. They have probably factored in the potential loss of users already and it probably ain’t much.