It's a weird balance right?

You'd think letting 3rd party developed apps for your platform frees up resources you would otherwise put in to develop your own app.

Individuals that use third party apps are probably power users so they're the one's submitting content and writing good comments. The very backbone to what brings people to the platform.

With quality of submissions and comments going down then presumably the number of actual visiters to the site will also go down. Thus lowering potential revenue.

The quality of Reddit comments has never been particularly high. Sure there are quality posts, but like other social media most posts are essentially spam and those that aren’t inaccurate/hyperbolic or just memes.

Once upon a time you could go to Reddit and skip the link because the top comment both summarized the article and gave poignant relevant commentary. Often times from someone that had professional knowledge in that field.

The problem is their revenue per user is garbage compared to other sites. Facebook is sitting at $70 per user/year. More users who don't bring revenue doesn't actually help the company. I think they should focus more on getting their ad platform to make a reasonable CPM, but I assume they've been trying and for whatever reason just can't make it happen. Maybe forcing users onto the official app is how they plan to boost the ad numbers?