If this had been handled differently, Huffman could have even won the support of redditors to help make the platform profitable.
I'm sure most reasonable people believe Reddit should be able to pay its bills so that we can have it as a resource. Spez just came out of the gate pissing everyone off and then doubled down at every opportunity to explain the move.
I have a theory and haven't seen anyone else suggest it yet. While I am sure Spez is the tard monkey he appears to be, he only has one choice.
The board/VC investors are ready to cash out now. Spez is too because this ceo job is a lot more annoying to do every day than trolling people. There is a massive payday just around the corner awaiting him and his buddies. The only metrics that matter are what his company looks like on paper to the likes of Goldman Sachs. He doesn't give a rip about mods, 3P apps, APIs, or even users.
Reddit is (probably) running out of cash. They can't even find a measly $10m bucks for Apollo. They can't afford to NOT get the ad revenue from 3P clients because the bills are so tight right now. You can't meet the salary of 3,000 "Snoos" (reddit employees) by pimping reddit gold all day long.
Spez needs to wrap this up ASAP so this bitch can get put out to sale and he can ride off into the sunset.
Time to just look to the future. reddit will have a lot of traffic for a long time because of it's huge footprint. So instead of making posts and engaging there, bring good content to Kbin and the fediverse.
Make it so useful and interesting that the good traffic starts to divert.