That makes the assumption that the user is both happy with the "reddit app" even though they are being railroaded into using it and that the interests of reddit and the user are coincident.

Or they're just incompetently ploughing through with a strategy that's damaging them.

Their mobile website is so atrociously bad, and the mobile app is not much better. Personally I use the Apollo app; it's 100x better than either, and I know reddit is only tracking me insofar as the API requests Apollo sends to them.

The hint that we don’t need an app. What use is served by the app over the website? The only thing I can think of is that you can’t (easily) block ads on an app, but can in a browser (if it lets you).

Sure, they’re in the business to make money, but if enough users leave because of the app and ads being shoved in their face, Reddit will start to make less money than they did without the app. It’s not gonna happen anytime soon, but it’ll happen eventually. Reddit won’t last forever, just like Digg and /. didn’t. Sure, they still exist, but (last I heard) their active user numbers keep going down.

Boy, glad they missed the video is growing train.

Mobile is huge and most people will consume Reddit via mobile.

The flaw is that Reddit is also based upon content creation and these people don't use mobile to create or at least not their app.