For a couple of years after Google Autocomplete rolled out it suggested adding “feet” to the end of any search I’d make on a famous woman’s name. I honestly didn’t get it at first. I’d never searched for feet in any context, so it wasn’t a personalized thing. I chalked it up either to other women wanting to see a pair of shoes she’d worn or to some weird Autocomplete bug. I’m not prudish, but the idea that so many people were into feet that they perved Google never crossed my mind.
Reddit’s only allowing a handful of these apps to limp along for now to keep up the fiction that they didn’t kill 3rd-party apps altogether. These devs are doing all this work to eke out revenue models based on hypothetical costs that can change any time Reddit updates their APIs, changes API call pricing, or updates the site’s functionality. Reddit’s management was completely unrepentant about lying to and about 3rd-party devs just a couple of months ago, and all of the risk around underestimating API costs are on these devs. I hope that none of them get billed or sued into bankruptcy over this.