WE HAD A GOOD THING YOU STUPID SON OF A BITCH!
We had 3PA's, we had all the free labor in the world, just from passionate people who wanted to share some topic, we had bots to fight spam, and extremely talented developers who made your stupid website work on mobile. It all ran like clockwork, if you could have just shut your mouth we'd all be fine right now.
But no, you just had to blow it up. YOU, AND YOUR GREED AND YOUR EGO.
The most frustrating part for me is that Reddit could have turned 3PAs into a revenue stream by just making the API pricing reasonable. No one would have been too upset by that, even the 3PA developers thought that would have been reasonable. Hell, I would have rather had Reddit just shut down 3PA explicitly, instead of the stupid cowardly strongarm tactic.