Definition of a threat:
a statement of an intention to inflict pain, injury, damage, or other hostile action on someone in retribution for something done or not done.
Let’s assume for a second that the Apollo dev DID in fact mean what they thought he meant at first. Can someone explain to me how that would make it a threat? "Buy my app, or else… " what? Or else what? In what universe could that even have been a threat?
I keep thinking back on this and how this whole argument about whether or not it was a threat is a complete red herring because there was nothing he can threaten them WITH, so how can you construe it as a threat?
The statement that was supposed to be a “threat” was something along the lines of “if you want Apollo to go quiet, you can buy out the app.” In context, they were talking about how often Apollo sends API requests to Reddit’s servers. If Reddit bought Apollo and made it into an official app, then it wouldn’t have to use the public API, so it’d “go quiet” in that sense. The Apollo dev explained all this during the call, so Reddit didn’t just misunderstand the context, they had to intentionally ignore it.
Yeah but that would be a pretty empty threat as Reddit is fully empowered to simply block api access.