That IS what happened, in april.
What happened this month is that the API users (aka 3rd party authors) expressed their dismay at trying to work with reddit's announced changes or getting any movement out of reddit that would allow them to continue.
In a nutshell:
Imagine if you own a nice Jaguar - keep it in your garage and let the neighbours borrow it to go to the shops. Now you need to do some maintenance, and make up for losses in your taxi service (which might cost $2 per km) so you wanna price this as a premium service. ... so you could charge them $5 takeout fee plus $1 per km, or (if you're greedy) just go for $5 per km.
What Reddit did is say 'Fuck you, you want to use it, you pay $100 per km or fuck off - we don't care'.
The amount of money Reddit makes for you getting advertisements is actually less than $1 per km... The same occurs with YouTube. If you actually click to donate, then you can pay enough to cover thousands of hours of advertisements in one small swipe.
What we need is MICROpayments spread across a wider user-base to balance the ad-supported platform, and then people will accept that small payments are better.
Two things would have done it for me. They could have offered a user token subscription that I could port to all my accounts. Sure there could be token sharing with that method, but for a "modest" user cost, I might have been tolerable of it. They would have had to open the third party apps at the same time, but it would have bought time. The second thing would have been extending advertising through the third party app. That might discourage users of the free third party app, but it would also have given time to readjust the market price. Maybe the compromise would be that the free app could still be free of Reddit ads, but it wouldn't be customizable or would be limited in the number of additional subreddits with certain ones that were fixed to those free accounts. The key in both cases would be to work at making Reddit still available to those third party apps via the API and not the way it was brought to those developers. Lose the third party support, lose the support of moderators who have learned to be efficient with their way of using the site, lose the site.
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