I truly don't understand the narrative from the past few days.

These third parties lived by serving their own ads instead of reddit's. They paid $0 to reddit yet made a very good living themselves (at least for the top ones like apollo and sync).

And yet the narrative is now that they provided tremendous value to reddit by providing them with exposure (lol!) and that their users were creating most of reddit's content (which is most certainly false) and that reddit are monsters who duped them.

Let's be real here. Those developers had a good run, they made a living of of reddit's content for a decade. Bravo. That was nice. But they all knew it was going to end one day ("Is it fair for Apollo to not pay reddit?" was a common question on the apollo sub, so even the USERS knew it wasn't a fully bidirectional relationship).

This completely writes off the difficulty of and time required to build a great mobile app. If it was simple and easy Reddit would have just made their own instead of buying out an existing one.