The fees are so high that the developer behind Apollo said his bill would be $20M per month. As a result he announced he’d be shutting down the app. Many users are upset because they feel that these third-party apps provide a much better user experience than the official web and mobile apps.
There’s also some bad blood because at one point the dev behind Apollo was in negotiations with Reddit that went sour. Reddit CEO accused him of trying to extort the company, but Apollos dev released the recording of a conversation he had with the CEO where the CEO admitted the extortion had been a misunderstanding.
As for the mods, they will lose access to tools that make moderation easier. Mainly because of this, but also due to the Drama with third-party apps as a form of protest, several sub Reddit’s, some of which are among the largest communities on the site, decided to go private.
Those are the general highlights. Someone can jump in in case I missed anything.
Some users are annoyed as they are using 3rd party apps to help with moderation.
They can protest by making subreddits private.
But Reddit has been a clunky, ugly, painful user experience for many years and has succeeded despite that, so I guess Reddit will win.
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