You can listen to the song on his YouTube channel as well: https://youtu.be/KOFChFxsJ3I

What most people missed, much less understood, from that interaction is that Reddit justified the API cost based on “opportunity cost”.

This means that Reddit was saying that they weren’t trying to kill off third party apps but that they simply were trying to charge $20MM/y to recoup the earnings they’re losing out on by virtue of people using Apollo instead of Reddit’s own offerings.

So yeah, like you said, he clearly tried to call BS on the price motivation by essentially saying “if my mere existence is causing you to lose out on $20MM/y of earnings, why don’t you cut a check for $10MM to buy Apollo”.

Because logically if it really was about opportunity cost and the pricing of $20MM/y would accurately reflect that, then a one time $10MM purchase would be such a steal compared to losing $20MM/y, it would have any CEO scrambling to sign a check the moment the option was even so much as whispered.

Instead the API pricing was simply a ploy to kill off third party apps and the “opportunity cost” nonsense was mere pretext to be able to maintain that it wasn’t about killing off third party apps.

Not to mention that outside of the vacuum of this specific matter, the whole ordeal was littered with duplicitous lies, like how it would be a fair and reasonable price when every other comparable API is multiple orders of magnitude cheaper, safe for Muskrat’s.

Imgur for example would charge $166/50 million request, compared to Reddit’s $12,000 for the same amount. Or put it differently, Imgur charges $276,666/y compared to Reddit’s $20MM/y.

Yeah, how dare he, after almost a decade of work, refuse to get back into the code mines at your whim and repurpose the app super easy in “a few hours”.

/s

Get a grip.

Not only would it take far more than “a few hours”, he owes you jack all.

Even if he would be interested in making a Lemmy app, he’d be well within his right to take a break from things.

In short: money.

Long story is that a lot of these tech companies started as startups funded by VCs.
Borrowing money was cheap so they got dumped buckets of money onto them to burn in an effort to try to get a foothold and/or kill off competition by undercutting them.

Now that they’ve gained a foothold and in some cases have a near monopoly or duopoly and now that borrowing money isn’t cheap anymore, they need to start cutting cost if not outright turn a profit.

And so the enshittification begins.

Specifically for Twitter, Musk needs to cut cost because he bought Twitter at a severe premium and has made it less valuable by the minute ever since he took over. This to the point that he is leaving bills unpaid.

Specifically for Reddit, they’ve burned through all that VC money and have been eying a juicy exit in the form of an IPO. An IPO would be a payday for everyone who initially invested into Reddit because now they can sell their shares for more than what they invested (or at least that’s their hope). In order to get a good price once they go public they want to cut cost and increase revenue to seem as valuable as possible.

Specifically for YouTube, the ad game has been generating less and less revenue over time and advertisers have been burned in the past by having their ads placed next to objectionable content.
So the knee-jerk reaction is to severely tighten the rules for content, lest they be demonetized.
This however made creators realize that their livelihood in the form of the pittance that’s called AdSense payout is very fragile, so they started moving to doing sponsorships, soliciting Patreon donations and partnering with Nebula.

Now YouTube is missing out on those revenue streams and often ad revenue as well as creators often turn off ads on their video when they have sponsor deals etc. So what does YouTube do? They started monetizing videos of creators who are not eligible for their partner program (i.e. place ads on videos and not share it with creators) and not give those creators the option to turn off ads, they started severely increasing the amount of ads on videos that do run ads, they started severely pushing YouTube Premium and now they’re cracking down on adblockers.