Seems that someone at Reddit decided to grant read access to RIF, this morning I opened the app just for kicks and it wouldn’t load anything. Well I tried again after lunch (Europe CET time) and it could access the front page but I was logged out. Trying to login shows a different logon page and even with valid credentials gives out a ‘Bad request’ response.
That means they are not just feeling the heat, they are probably burning really bad.
Maybe they can still say " oh hey look our traffic/requests are high"? They lost some valuation late last week so they might be looking for any way to indicate that the number of people/ access requests aren’t dropping.
Read only use is hardly good though, that’s just coating them money. You want engagement from users to drive ads.