One can only hope there'll be a watershed moment like the one that killed Digg. So far, reddit has been very careful raising the temperature so as to not scare the frog before it's dead.
That's maybe true as a first-order effect.
But, for the ads that everyone else sees to be worth anything, the site has to be worth visiting at all. If your most dedicated/prolific users mainly post/comment using third party apps, then making their experience worse will reduce the quality of the site overall (even if you start getting revenue on behalf of those dedicated users).
It strikes me as a very shortsighted move.
Thats really easy for Reddit to measure. Why are you assuming they haven't?
It strikes me as a very shortsighted move.
If you stop assuming that Reddit is run by idiots, and you consider the likely probability that they've modelled this stuff in some depth, it's easy to believe that your initial assumption is wrong, and that the users are on 1st party apps (or will be if others shut down), and that many will stay and continue to post rather than leave or stop posting.
Your premise is based wholly on the belief that you know more about Reddit users than Reddit does. That seems dubious to me.