I actually read this article for some random reason (it happens sometimes) and HN has a similar problem - there are third party apps that charge money. HN has always taken a friendly approach to third-party projects as long as they make it clear they aren't official and include links to the original HN comments/submissions, but the charging money part doesn't feel right to me. I'd rather that everything HN-related be free and in the spirit of just-because.

Since Google started charging us quite a bit for the Firebase API a year or two ago, we're in a similar position to what the article describes - we're paying for https://github.com/HackerNews/API and thus indirectly funding the commercial apps.

Btw this is not to take a side on any of the Reddit stuff - that would be ultra dumb of me and anyway I'm succeeding at staying ignorant of the details. But I think it's worth saying something publicly about the analogous issue on HN because we might have to do something about it at some point.

The current API isn't particularly usable (you have to request individual items to get an entire thread) and our long term plan is to replace it with a more usable one that just gives a JSON representation of any HN URL and is hosted on our server. I've been posting about that for an embarrassing number of years (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) but you all know how slow we are. Anyhow, whenever we get there, we'll probably do proper things like have API keys and terms of service and whatnot. If the commercial app thing is still a thing at that point, maybe we can find some decent way to address it.