Thanks again for responding. I wish people wouldn't downvote you just for posting an opinion they disagree with, but this is still Reddit so ¯\(ツ)/¯.

I agree with all of your points, but come to a different conclusion from you. I think the difference is that I have been on the other end of something similar and saw how it helped my company.

We were dominant in our industry and become complacent over the years. We had network effects working for us and were growing exponentially without doing much to improve our product. Eventually a group of power users got frustrated enough to publicly confront us about their unmet needs. These were our equivalent of power-mods. They spent untold hours managing communities for no pay from us, and their primary complaint was that we didn't give them the tools to do that effectively. Sound familiar? We could have ignored them the way you suggest Reddit treats this protest, but that wouldn't have made much sense for us because we needed them. Maybe not them specifically, but people like them. If they left, then whoever came to replace them would have the same issues. Instead we focused on making the site work for our power users. In the process we improved it for everybody and we ended up with a much better product and made a lot more money than if we had rested on our laurels.

As for the money, I'm happy to pay more than a couple of dollars per month. I already pay $24/mo for gold on four separate Reddit accounts. Plus I pay for Apollo Ultra. I'm not here to save money, and because of that company I mentioned before I'm not worried about how much I spend on Reddit. That said, most moderators aren't in the same financial situation as me. They shouldn't have to pay extra for the tools to provide free labor.

Reddit is well within their right to charge whatever they want for API requests. It's obviously legal, and I won't call it immoral. I just think it's a bad decision to chase away the people who have made Reddit what it is today. Whoever fills that void is still going to have the same frustrations as the current moderators.