As a Canadian, this makes me really appreciate our one-party consent laws even more (I've never had to use them myself).

Spez really dug his own hole with this one. He thought he was gonna get away with murder and now everyone knows him for the piece of shit he really is.

They may still manage an IPO, but it's not going to be anywhere near as successful as it would've been if this had been handled properly. If they were concerned about Ad revenue, all they had to do was say that all 3rd party clients must serve ads to anyone who isn't paying for a reddit premium account on top of potential app payments or subscriptions. Easy peasy. Nobody would've batted an eye because we've come to accept ads as the cost of a free service.

The end of reddit may take longer than the end of digg, but the writing seems to be on the wall now.