I agree with the overall posture of the article - that Huffman/Reddit is handling this badly and being unreasonable - but the article complains that they want to make money, saying that they get the content for free so they shouldn’t ask to. That makes no sense. Yes, they get the content itself for free, but Reddit has costs, including infrastructure and employees, and it doesn’t make sense to say they should just donate those costs. If that was the long-term prospect, they’d just shutter the site.

And the 3PA developers seemed to all agree that they should pay Reddit for the API access, so that isn’t really one of the issues. The issues are:

• The pricetag they imposed is untenable
• They gave very insufficient notice before the changes would take place, so the developers didn’t have time to accommodate
• They are not going to allow ads on 3PAs, which means many would have to go to a different business model
• They aren’t going to allow NSFW content through the API, for reasons that make no sense, and that will reduce the desirability of the apps for a lot of people, reducing the customer base
• They slandered and maligned the developers and mods to make themselves look more reasonable

All together it makes a clear picture of them simply wanting to kill the 3PAs. And their handling of the resulting protests is a shit show.

So there are lots of legitimate reasons to be pissed at them, but them wanting to make money from the investment isn’t one of them.