In all fairness, that's how Twitter did things from what I can understand.
Of course, that can be quite the payroll expense, especially with a weird model with a panoply of interest-based domains.
I'm sure the Reddit employees will be up to it and has all the equipment necessary for it. That protest was about the amazing internal tooling the mods loved using, right?
Pretty sure spez said it wasn't the cost of running or maintaining the API that was the problem, but the opportunity cost of having users on third party apps. At least, that's what I cleaned from Christian Selig's post.