To me, as a native speaker, it sounds like it was a serious offer but he didn't know how else to bring it up. Which I don't blame him. And I think he knew what the Reddit community response was going to be like and he sure as hell worded his original post that started this off really well to make sure the reddit community went nuts.

For me "go quiet" doesn't even make sense in that conversation other than the way it was taken. In the terms of loud api user, it would still have been a large user of the API if Reddit owned it or not.

I can't wait until next month for it to all blow over. Because I really don't see anyone building a competitor.