If you’re referring the third-party app developers of Twitter or Reddit, that isn’t what’s happening there. They would like to pay Reddit, but Reddit set the price so extremely high as to make it no choice at all, which is exactly what they want, so they can control all user analytics.
That's exactly what's happening here. This is the same "30% is too much" argument Apple gets from Epic and others. The only difference is that Reddit hasn't been charging to this point. Don't get me wrong, the API users have every right to bitch about it, but at the end of the day, if they can't convince Reddit to back down, they can either put up or shut up.
Note that the fact that Reddit lied to some API client developers and misrepresented their position is definitely all on Reddit, it doesn't change the essential fact that Reddit is the one responsible for the platform's creation and upkeep, and if they decide that they want the API users to share that cost, they have every right to do so.
Also, the notion that “people these days” are lazy, or don’t want to work, or pay for things, is a very old trope going back decades and decades.
Completely aside from the fact that I never said what you have quotation marks around above, it goes back much farther than "decades and decades". Much farther.
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