It's hard to articulate. Reddit is at its core only a platform. All it did was give users a place to create, curate, contribute, and connect to, with, and for communities. Reddit was our magic feather. We didn't need them all along. All it did was tear down some mental blocks, so we could get started.

We wouldn't even be that mad if Reddit was trying to be reasonable. They're just being parasitic toward us, if we're being honest with ourselves. They want us to do all the work, so they can make all the money from our work, and then they want to charge us money for the honor of having been monetized. And it's not even that they're just chasing multiple different monetization schemes in moderation so that everyone profits. They intend to be greedy fucks in every transaction. They want users to pay subscription fees for Reddit premium (which isn't well priced, and therefore doesn't sell many subscriptions). Furthermore, they want developers to pay outrageous API licensing fees (which aren't well priced, and therefor almost all the developers are just shuttering). Not only that, they want to charge API fees toward AI training companies. My guess? Their prices are again too high, and the result will be that AI studios will just not pay for an official license and will do web scraping. It will require more work for them to get the scrapers to properly parse the threads, since what AI studios are interested in are threaded conversations right now. The AI studios will determine it is worth it to pay some engineers to do that rather than to pay the money Reddit wants (per my understanding, Reddit is charging the same money for AI studios as 3rd party apps).

So, where does that leave Reddit? Only with advertising revenue. They could lower the prices for their other services and make more money than that, but you would need to understand long-term cause and effect to do that, and u/spez has NOT demonstrated that kind of awareness. As evidence, note that advertisers are starting to reassess their contracts with Reddit (which by the way, their ads suck! You've collected all this demographic info about your users, but you can't provide advertisements that draw any kind of interest!? And you think you can be of value to AI companies!? What the fuck are you doing!?). Reddit's greed is losing them money.