I’ve been posting this to subs that haven’t blacked out:

Reddit wants to begin selling API data access to large AI companies at a really high margin so those AI companies can train their data on the content we generate and contribute to reddit, and reddit can make a shit ton of money on that.

This data API is also how third party apps and mod tools access reddit. Rather than charging apps a lower tier and AI companies a large one, reddit has instead decided to charge everyone for that data access.

As a result, not only are third party reddit apps going away because they’d have to charge huge fees to their users, but so are a lot of the tools that reddit’s unpaid volunteer moderators use to moderate subs, which means moderation quality is going to drastically drop soon.

In addition, the official reddit app is terrible for accessibility, and does not work with things like screen readers that blind or partially-sighted people use. These issues have been reported to reddit since alienblue became the official reddit app, reddit does not care to put money into fixing them. third party apps do this. people who rely on these apps to be able to even use reddit are basically getting kicked off reddit for being disabled.

All so reddit can cash in on all the content the communities of reddit produce, without compensating the content creators nor paying the unpaid volunteer moderators whose lives they just made way more difficult.