It doesn’t matter to current leadership of reddit how many people it pisses off. For every user of third-party apps, there are now 10 bots and sockpuppet accounts it gets to count as active users.
And that is exactly how you blow the roof off your IPO. Alphabet and Meta have been lying about their user engagement numbers for decades at this point. “Impressions” are all self-reported and they have zero incentive to be honest. Reddit’s VC money is begging Spez to get into this game before the IPO. For all they lies they are saying out loud, this is the quiet one.
It’s much harder to fake volume when a portion of it can be counted very accurately using play store/ Apple store statistics. Kill those apps off and you kill activity verification.