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That sounds a lot like the usual piracy advocate excuse "they're not losing any money through piracy, it gives them free exposure".

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Reddit encouraged third party clients for a long time, and made no effort to monetize them. The piracy analogy is completely inappropriate.

Reddit could still encourage third party clients and also monetize them in a reasonable way, but they have chosen to be unreasonable and will almost certainly kill the market for those apps.

A simple reasonable way is that you have to pay a subscription to Reddit to use a third party app. The app maker would then just have to charge enough to make a profit for their time spent creating and supporting the app.

Business owners say that to freelancers. Pirates don't say that.

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