I’ve said before, but I think they made a calculated decision to intentionally throw away all of their 3rd party app users. Essentially, some of those users will go to the first party app, but either way, none of us are giving reddit any ad revenue anyway, and that’s how Reddit makes money.

Their calculation was wrong for several reasons:

• The users that they are forcing away produce content, and Reddit would not have users generating ad revenue if Reddit did not have content.
• A huge proportion of the people who make Reddit function (moderators) rely on third-party apps and affected bots/services like push/shift. Making those people leave is a Bad Idea.
• Reddit has never had to worry about section 504 compliance (equal opportunity for service participation for people with disabilities) because third party apps have historically provided such opportunities. So r/blind probably wasn’t even on their radar - but their website and first-party app do not function with screen readers, so I fully expect them to get sued if they go through with this.

This is probably great for (very) short-term income, which is what Reddit wants before they go public. But obviously, it’s bad in every way beyond that.