One thing I've learned about bay area companies: You can never be too cynical; they'll almost always be way ahead of you.

The typical easy way is to have many "unfortunate mistaken outages". This is how Google via Maps and Mail handled Opera 6+ times (iirc), how Facebook handled Opera Mini 8+ times with the login javascript doing more and more esoteric things, etc etc.

I believe Firefox has witnessed something similar in the past few years couple of years with popular properties.

I wouldn't put it past the Reddit team to try to do something similar to push away people from their old, less monetizable interface.