I have a feeling like he is being squeezed by the investors. It feels like they want a tiktok/Instagram clone and he is the one that has to tell the Reddit community.
I don't think this was his vision for the site or he would have done it years ago.
Like it doesn't make it less shitty but more understandable I guess?
I get that he may be under pressure to make unpopular decisions, but I still can't believe that he invited the whole of Reddit to an AMA and then just answered 14 questions - as if that wouldn't turn out to be the PR disaster it was. Trying to think of a rational explanation beyond "just incompetent" is really hard after that - unless he has some hidden agenda that involves sabotaging Reddit. There's surely no way he couldn't have known that AMA would be a disaster.
I think the AMA was to slander the Apollo Dev and make him seem unreasonable. The 1$ per user and month line suggests this to me. Christian just pre-empted it with his post but since they had already made the announcement there was no going back now.