> it was inevitable Reddit wouldn't offer free services to businesses making profit off of their content forever
Their content. The audacity. Reddit is built on users' content and on free moderation. Sure it was inevitable that Reddit would lock things down for profit. But lets not pretend that this is Reddit's content.
For the 3rd time you are entirely incorrect. I won't quote the TOS again for you, as I have done twice already.
The moment you post to reddit, they can do anything they want with the content. It is now theirs.
It's also naïve to say reddit was built upon users' content. Yes the content is the most important bit and the reasons users are there today - but that ignores all of the software and infrastructure that made it all possible. There's a reason reddit is what it is today, and it was not an accident.
> The moment you post to reddit, they can do anything they want with the content. It is now theirs.
This is patently false. The content is not theirs, users grant Reddit a license to their content. See the TOS [1] you spoke of:
> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:
This isn't just some bit of semantics either. If you can contact the users, you could request a license for the content yourself. So really the only bastion Reddit has is technical measures for preventing scraping, since publicly accessible data is allowed to be scraped in the US due to legal precedent. That is, nothing in the TOS prevents other parties from displaying the data in other formats (as long as they don't use the API). The thing is, all the apps did make use of the API because they were not adversarial with Reddit, as opposed to webapps like libreddit that circumvent the API altogether.
Their content. The audacity. Reddit is built on users' content and on free moderation. Sure it was inevitable that Reddit would lock things down for profit. But lets not pretend that this is Reddit's content.