All they had to do was make showing ads part of the ToS for developing third party apps, to require login for API access, and make only mass scraping require $$$.
All they had to do was make showing ads part of the ToS
for developing third party apps,
It seems like such an obvious solution to me, but I haven't seen it mentioned.
One possible shortcoming (from Reddit's perspective) is the fact that the official Reddit app doesn't just show ads, it also collects all sorts of other user behavior data. So for them it might be able more than simply showing ads.
That's just a wild guess on my part, though.
I believe ads bring in the vast majority of money, behavior data helps ad targeting and can maybe sometimes bring in insignificant amounts as well.
Can you really make that much money with behavior data?
Telegram does this, and I think they're successful with it.
Yeah, and this is them being unreasonable. The insistence on all the large platforms on doing that even when all of their users revolt is childish and killed a lot of platforms already.
First exempt personal paid premium accounts from the api limitations & ads. Then the goal is to benefit from the already existing and thriving 3rd party app ecosystem. Make your API serve ads in non-premium API calls and profit share the ad revenue with 3rd party app developers. Optionally allow 3rd party apps to remove ads (paid API calls) and show their own ads, however make your ads more attractive & lucrative for 3rd party developers.
In the future I would also like to see that subreddits can gain control of the ads shown in their subreddits (subreddits already understand their audience far better than reddit corporate ever will). Then eventually profit share with moderator teams and content submitter, basically copy youtubes model to incentivize content submitters & good moderation.