ha-ha. Loving these double-faced stories here and there. “Crawling Reddit, generating value, and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with.” Very well Mr. Huffman, but what about “Posting on Reddit, generating free content which brings multi-hundred-million advertisement profits for the company, and not getting any of that value back is something which your users don't have the slightest problem with.“ The API is just a convenience to get the data, but surely you can get all the data you want without any additional API for free just by using their HTTP API - as any other generic user would do. Of course, filling up an enormous proxy well to avoid various ingenious "protections" could cost you some 10-20 bucks, and solving captchas automatically could cost you another 1$ for 1000, but from there, it's even easier and more enjoying to use than an API. I'm feeling like launching a scrape-it-all service to avoid greedy ip-protocol customs officers could be a profitable venture these days.