> but to force users to use their crappy app so they can track users better

That's the point: let the users pay you to make up for the (potential?) revenue you're not making from tracking them. Estimates put reddit at something like $0.25 per user. Pushing them to the official app might _generously_ triple that number. Versus the user paying $5/mo? It's a braindead business case to say that users in your official app are materially better than the same users directly paying for the service they actually want.