This is something I can’t seem to figure out. Let’s just assume that 3rd party apps are the reason reddit is losing money. So, it would make sense that reddit wants to start charging for their API access. But why is the burden on the apps and not the users?
Google already copies every public web page they can find, as part of search indexing. They don’t need to use API queries; they can just scrape the published HTML just like they do for every other page on the web.