Reading this with 15 years of corporate experience the developer was at best naive. In corporate speak Reddit is completely consistent in their actions and words. It's a crappy situation and I'm sure the developer is a great person and I agree Reddit did them dirty but also that's how these things work. You don't take dependencies on third parties without a lawyer and a contract.
> There's not gonna be any change on it.
Nobody can make this promise, those are just words to make you feel good.
> There's no plans to, there's no plans to touch it right now in 2023.
Plans can be made quickly. Action can be taken without a plan. What is the guarantee on lead time?
> And if we do touch it, we're going to be improving it in some way.
Define improvement. Improved for who?
> It's going to have a firm basis in reality.
I have no doubt that Reddit based the API pricing on them making money on it. We can debate if they got it right.
> We're going to try to be as transparent as we can.
Try is a weasel word, this sentence is meaningless. Zero transparency can be provided and still meet the standard of being "as transparent as possible". "Try" here even gives them the opportunity to be less transparent than possible. The Glomar defense ("We can neither confirm nor deny") is "as transparent as possible" and actually meets a higher standard than Reddit promised here because the CIA didn't just "try", they successfully provided the most possible transparency (almost none).
