"History may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes" -Mark Twain
It definitely feels like a throw back to before we had these massive centralized 'social networks'.
Reddit will live on, but I think we'll see a shift to the fediverse. It's the best of both worlds. Smaller communities but with that big network feel if you want. Activity pub is great.
Part of me thinks they were planning on using the high rate as a negotiation tactic. Ask for twice what you want, then back down to your actual number.
Then the Apollo dev "miscommunication" happened and things got ugly. Maybe they'll still back down, but maybe they'll die on that hill.
The other part of me thinks they just want to kill 3p apps and this is the easiest way to do that. Just price them out. They probably had some accountant or MBA crunch numbers on how many people would leave vs how much more revenue driving people to their ad ridden hellscape of an app...and figured it was worth the bad press.
Hell, they probably saw what Netflix just did with account sharing and were like "they got more subscribers!!!".
I think we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Reddit. It will be slow at first then all at once.