Reddit never expected the new api pricing to be a fountain or money. This was never about LLMs or the lack of ad revenue.

If it was just about LLMs they could have made one price for api users that were primarily harvesting data and a different price for api users that contributed significant content or moderation. Which would make good business sense to do so as content contributors are what bring the eyeballs (and therefore the value) to the platform.

It wasn’t about ad revenue either, by all estimates the revenue from a third-party app user would have been many times more than the opportunity cost from the ad revenue they were missing out on from 3rd party app users. If they wanted to profit from the api pricing, they only needed to give the community more time to transition business models. They didn’t even need to give everyone more time, just a dozen or so major third party apps.

This was always about killing off the third party apps. The ones they let survive had low user counts to begin with and went even lower.

I don’t know their real motivations here but so far there’s only two possibilities that i can think of.

A) Reddit’s leadership and board of directors are beyond incompetent

B) They collect significantly more data from the first party app than they were able to from the third party apps, and they’re selling that data for a significant sum of money beyond just their own ad ecosystem.