I don't know, the whole post reads like a "So long, and thanks for all the fish" to me. They don't need a community anymore because they got bigger and at this point it's just easier to close it rather than having employees taking care of the user contributions.

Reddit has just pulled the plug to all their open source repositories. This will make it harder to develop and keep third party clients updated, like the ones without ads for example.

To be fair, the comment from DuckDuckGo in the Reddit thread[1] says that they will continue to put resources into it ("staff are still improving the Instant Answers we have, and will create any new Instant Answers we see are needed"). Which means the only change really happening here is to shut off the contributions that DDG receives from others for free, which doesn't really make sense as a business decision, either.

On the other hand, if you view it as an announcement that they're going to be taking Instant Answers closed source to keep future changes in-house, then it makes sense.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/6ymjj8/duckduck...