Its not about the revenue, its about forcing everyone to get ads, with endless tracking.
They say a product reflects the organization that produced it, and it's clear from the app that this is a company with unchecked Promo-Driven-Development and Resume-Driven-Development. There is no impressive metric that measures app jankiness or design clarity in isolation, and the effort to fix it is disproportionately larger than the line that it adds to your resume or promo package. So even though it's glaringly obvious that the app is broken within 3 seconds of opening it, not a single person anywhere in the org is incentivized to fix it.
Then why is that not an option? The narrative that they want more tracking and control makes sense with the facts we have.
* https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update...
"If you are using OAuth for authentication: 100 queries per minute per OAuth client id
If you are not using OAuth for authentication: 10 queries per minute"
edit: Ah, it also requires applying for an API key on their support website which may or may not be granted to you by Reddit and might take some amount of time. That is not comparable to having proper API access.
It's all about the money and tracking the user.
Why would they force users to do something they're not too pleased about if it wasn't entirely for generating revenue of some description?
Probably not. It's about money, not enforcing a uniform experience.
Plus: a subscription would drive many users away.