I have friends who fit the target audience criteria you mention. These people absolutely do not care about the client and never find the need to step outside the default client. My partner has access to Apollo Ultra through iCloud Family, yet she finds the default reddit client good enough.
If these people exist and they’re the majority, why kill 3rd party apps to mess with a minority?
Because if you're a ruthless company going public, you want to avoid ways for your users to block the ads or "cheat the walled garden." Forcing them to use the official app is the way to go. And advertisers feel safe.
I'm not saying I approve the practice. I'm saying that it makes sense from their perspective.
Hah it’s funny you mention Filthy Frank specifically as he himself is now Joji[0] the very serious and not funny musician. He deleted all his old videos and scrubbed the evidence of who he once was, similar (although not as egregious) to the scat video Blippi posted [1] to get internet fame before he became a beloved children’s YouTuber.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Qzzggn--s&pp=ygUESm9qaQ%3D%3... [1] Seriously, I’m not actually going to post the video. Im sure you can find it if you really want to. My kids aren’t allowed to watch Blippi though.
The reality is that Reddit hasn't ceased growing since then. The same thing happened with YouTube. YouTube pushed its content to switch from filthyfrank to Jimmy Kimmel/Fallon. Advertisers are not interested in us, early-adopters, mostly young and middle-aged western males. They want kids and soccer-moms: they're less likely to install an ad-blockers, and have a much wider range of products for which they're the target audience.
I think we need to understand that we were never the target audience.
Reddit, like YouTube, will do more then fine. The early-adopters just won't be part of it.
My hope is that we will go back to independently ran niche-community bulletin-boards, like in the 2000s with phpBB, instead of piggy-backing on some other new for-profit corporate product.