Probably analyzed the Twitter population before and after the API change, and it seems Twitter survived, so they wish to replicate this.

They're betting that the masses are too baked in to care. Reddit's CEO said it himself, they're counting on this to blow over. The best message you can send to them is to delete your reddit account and in the box that asks why you're doing so, tell them you're leaving for lemmy. Encourage your communities to follow you. This has happened one before with us old-timers who remember the Great Digg Migration. (Interesting internet history read if you have time.)

Because their intent is to force people to use their native applications. They're intentionally making it difficult/impossible for third party apps to exist. They're wagering that their clout surpasses the bad-will they'll get for the crummy move.

Then they can bombard everyone with "he gets you" ads or whatever the most recent ad garbage is, and get their full revenue.

The high pricetag provides the failed venere 'if every user paid the fair cost of X monthly, you can use our api' in an attempt to limit said bad-will from the community.

Avarice and a will to control.

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.