It sounds like you are saying there is no reason other than pressure, presumably from a board. Perhaps the board has a reason.

Probably sopping up more money from all the privacy intrusions possible with an app. Better ad revenue. Probably spent money on the app and need validation of the expense. Board might even have threatened whole team terminations without better app take up.

How many times is improvement UX in desired there?

I think people are usually over-inclined to assume that these companies know what they're doing; that there is, somewhere, some well-thought-out master plan. Often, there isn't.

Even with Twitter, which has just been a cavalcade of obviously nonsense moves for months and months, there are still believers in The Plan. I'm actually a little curious why this is; despite presumably having had interactions with poorly-run companies in the course of their daily lives, some people _really_ seem to struggle with the idea that a company might be poorly-run, and seek any other explanation.

Because a reasonable person will have a plan. Maybe not the best plan, maybe not a master plan, but a plan. To your specific point:

'person knows what they are doing' does not equal have a 'well-thought-out master plan'

Problem in big companies is that its is filled with people that , especially the higher you go, have their own plans and agendas. Sometimes they align with each other and oftentimes some part of company is actively trying to sabotage some other part of company.

Individuals also have their own personal goals such as high bonuses or maybe high IPO, where you will sell out and become rich.

And as CEO you have to not only have a plan, but also set up initiatives for people to follow it, which is often harder than it seems. That is why it sometimes seems a company is sabotaging itself. Sometimes there is something deeper going on but sometimes they are sabotaging themselves.

An apposite war story from Nokia, just about the time the iPhone entered the market: our Lords and Masters had decided that internal competition would be a good thing, so smartphones were divided into business, entertainment, and mass market divisions with each bidding for exclusive access to the components being delivered by the the R&D and productisation teams. So it was that barcode readers ended up with "business" (use case: scan a business card) and auto focus cameras with "entertainment" (use case: selfie). With of course the result that the business phone needed an A4-sized business card held at arm's length. This absurd "strategy", probably sold in by a gaggle of consultants, was first celebrated then subject to extensive soul-searching and some tedious "lessons learned" enquiries that resulted in long PowerPoints filed carefully in NUL, rather than perhaps simply resolving next time to ask some small child working in the front line just what they thought of the Emperor's splendid new attire...

I’m not necessarily pointing a finger at the pressure or motivation to want mobile app growth. Pre-IPO is a stressful time. It’s mostly about how the team goes about attempting to accomplishing those goals and a management/product culture and talent thing that was likely in place well beforehand. Based on the last redesign and https://new.reddit.com there are plenty of signals of doing things for the sake of doing them or for UI trends, not because it makes it fundamentally better.

It’s easy to miss these failures internally and assume the teams/management are functional and effective when your app keeps growing… via Reddit’s content and existing market dominance.

The VC board always has the same reason: revenue, revenue per user and their respective quarter over quarter percentage delta. Number go up = good. Number go up less than last quarter = bad. Number not go up = disaster.

I think your hypothesis is underrated. For sure part of the argument is to get around ad-blockers but people underestimate both the level of dysfunction and just how awful some people in powerful positions are.

This argument is at the intersection of “Wet streets cause rain” and “is pretty likely to be accurate”.

“All these other companies are successful and had experienced large mobile growth along that success. Maybe we can force that same success by boosting our own mobile numbers.”

See also Goodhart’s Law.

There's also a huge disconnect between what power users want and what the ad-viewing cannon fodder will tolerate. Headlines this week say that Netflix cracking down on password sharing has been hugely successful driving new signups.

Sometimes you just have to destroy the site to meet your OKR goals. Who hasn't done it once or twice in their career.