If I write a third party app, then I can filter out any ads you pass me, or I can make it easy for a user to do at arm’s length from me by allowing plugins. This is exactly what’s happening with reddit third party apps.

I don’t think it’s as black and white as you’re making out.

To be fair, I don’t think any of us know reddit’s costs nor its revenue. We do know that the current CEO says that they are “not profitable”. But let’s just pretend for a minute that if reddit did what you say (scale down, stop the NFT TT bullshit) that they’d be a ‘stable successful business’.

Ask yourself: Would YOU want to work for a company that’s just eeking by, with limited growth or upward potential for your personal income? I sure as hell wouldn’t. If reddit ‘tried’ to act like a co-operative they’d quickly lose the limited talent they do have to be replaced by “digital babysitters” who have the skills to reboot a server when it hangs and not much else. They certainly ain’t going to attract the devs who can actually CREATE the mod tools that we’ve been after for YEARS.

At some point we need reddit and other sites like it to be profitable so that they can attract talent to continue to develop and expand the features of the site or else some other company will come along and do exactly that, putting reddit out of business.

Does reddit need to become profitable solely off the backs of API calls, no; which is why I’m here (and you too I assume) but we cannot pretend that any of this work is either easy or free to produce.