People will always want free things; that's nothing new! Especially on an Internet that was born free (aside from the cost to connect).
The average "Reddit" business is pretty odd; they want:
* Paying subscribers _and_ advertising revenue
* Free content: posts & comments
* Free moderation: voting & ToS enforcement
* The ability to monopolize said content
* Contributors to continue to pour millions of man-hours to make content for the site and never ask for anything like ad-free viewing, an enjoyable user-experience, tooling, etc.
Social platforms present a difficult balance between the users, contributors, moderators, and business - all within a very hostile internet (in terms of security, spam, etc).
For payment to happen, users do demand significant value to be parted from their $. In Reddit's case, the 3rd party apps are strongly desired because the 1st party app does not meet their needs (users _pay_ for these apps!). Reddit doesn't want to compete on UX, as they're demonstrably bad at it; partially due to lack of skill and due to mismatched incentives.
It seems like they incorrectly assume that they own the community, rather than the other way around. Reddit's primary value is in the content they are _given_ in exchange for hosting & tools - both of which are have significant downward cost pressure (which _should_ trend towards free, given a large enough community).
Reddit is trying to switch their customers from users to advertisers in order to make a profit, which is difficult after years of _generally_ serving users. It is bait and switch at it's finest and most egregious.
Sorry, but looking at it really doesn't do it justice. There are a lot of integration features that only appear when you need them. The UX is great because it's uncluttered and still powerful.
Using attendance is a carrot to get students to show up, which leads to better learning outcomes overall - which should be the goal.