Well you see, finding a way to reliably deliver ads via the API would have taken far too much developer brainpower for a company that can’t make a functional video player or a mobile app
It honestly wouldn’t be that hard at all. You deliver ads via the API alongside actual posts, as if they are an actual post, and forbid altering them in the developer ToS. If you want to be anal about enforcement, run popular 3rd-party apps in an emulator to verify that the JSON returned by the site is unaltered when it’s rendered in the app. You could put this together in a weekend.
Which really just speaks to quality of talent at reddit, or the management at reddit suppressing that talent. Or both.
I mentally checked out of reddit when I got a comment deleted and a 3-day sitewide ban for saying:
“It is always OK to punch a Nazi.”
It was a literal comment, not figurative, nothing was being compared, etc. Just a straight statement about actual past and present-day Nazis. Ban.
The 3rd-party app fiasco happened a couple of weeks later, and that was the second sign that I needed to GTFO.