When you put it that way, it’s pretty unbelievable they’ve done this. They had many developers willing to make more (and better) ways to interact with the site (wtf happened to “engagement”, isn’t that the literal buzzword these days?)
They could have literally just either had a fair pricing system, ads in the API, and removal of ads for Reddit premium users (or even all 3). Even if their main concern was AI scraping, just make it so it’s limited and you can’t literally just download the whole of Reddit. It’d be very easy to distinguish AI traffic from user traffic.
When you put it that way, it’s pretty unbelievable they’ve done this. They had many developers willing to make more (and better) ways to interact with the site (wtf happened to “engagement”, isn’t that the literal buzzword these days?)
They could have literally just either had a fair pricing system, ads in the API, and removal of ads for Reddit premium users (or even all 3). Even if their main concern was AI scraping, just make it so it’s limited and you can’t literally just download the whole of Reddit. It’d be very easy to distinguish AI traffic from user traffic.