We're not disagreeing. The comment I was responding to was saying they are "paying" Reddit with content. As you noted, Reddit doesn't want that, instead, it's asking API users to pay real money so they can see the content without ads. That in itself is pretty reasonable I think - what may not be reasonable is how much Reddit is asking for.

> Driving away content producers to lower costs just doesn’t make any sense at all

What's the breakdown of content producers on 3rd Party apps vs reddit.com and reddit apps? It is reasonable to assume this is a rational decision being made by Reddit after looking at the numbers and doing some projections.

Edit: removed references to ads from parent commenter paraphrasing