He’s right that Reddit’s “aggressive posture” is what’s annoyed a lot of users. When I first heard of them adding API costs, I didn’t care, because I didn’t use 3rd party apps. But their attitude since then is why I don’t want to use Reddit now.
They could have apologised for the inconvenience caused by their changes. They could have said something like “we recognise there are users who are not happy with these changes, and we apologise for the inconvenience, but we are in a position where we have to cover our server costs, or else Reddit may not survive into the future”. If they had put it like THAT then I bet most people would have understood where they’re coming from.
But instead they say things like “oh it’s only a small amount of users who are unhappy” and “this will blow over like all of these controversies do”. Basically saying “we don’t need to listen to you, fuck you, fuck your opinions, we assume you’ll use Reddit anyway”. AND didn’t they say they would respect mods protesting by shutting their subreddits? And then they’re like “no fuck you we’ll just force them open”.
So the impression they give off is not that they’re doing these API changes out of a financial necessity to ensure Reddit can survive into the future - instead, like many users have said, it seems like they are literally just trying to milk as many profits as possible in the short-term, so they can cash in as much as possible on the IPO, and then they can quit Reddit and retire to the Caribbean.
No user of Reddit is powerless. Every single user of Reddit has the power to fuck with Reddit in whatever legal way they want, and they also they have the power to quit using Reddit.