>>stanis+(OP)
I don't really understand why it had to be this way. It's so easy to think of other ways this could have been handled. Even just announcing the same change with 6 months of lead time rather than 1 month would have gone over better. Or boil the frog and gradually introduce API restrictions. It's as if the CEO is purposefully being as belligerent as possible to rile people up.
>>extr+k4
Because they want to IPO as soon as possible, so showing a bump of revenue from API shows the promise of more revenues for investors.
Remember they took a 41% cut in valuation recently. IPO is going to be challenging so they want to show as many different streams of revenue as possible.