And they were naive to try IMO. It was obvious that reddit had decided that they were willing to lose users over the API thing. They knew that there was a subset of users that couldn’t stand their new design and would never use their app because the other apps were really just a way to avoid the ongoing enshitification on the site. The mods that thought they could fight it were assuming that they were dealing with the same reddit that had been trying to balance users and profits and would be appalled to see droves of users leaving.

The API change was them deciding to bite the bullet and just deal with that exodus of users. They expected to make shitloads of money from AI training but the API made it trivial to just ignore them and train on their data anyways.