If he’d announced that they were going to force the app developers to share ad revenue or charge users a reasonable monthly fee for ad-free access and share that with Reddit, I think the backlash would have been far less.
But that’s not what Steve wants. He wants to get all the ad revenue AND be able to track user activity to sell to the data brokers/advertisers. This was never going to be a situation that we users found reasonable.
I can’t help but notice how similar their phrasing is to Spez trying to justify why Reddit has yanked the rug out from under their third party app developers.