zlacker

Reddit doesn't make money directly from providing a good clean user experience, they make money by putting ads in front of retinas, and they can drive up the value of said ads by mining user data (which can also be sold).

People gravitate towards third party apps because they have less ads, and because since they don't mine for data as much as the official app the user experience is more like "classic" Reddit and less like an algorithmic content pipe alla TikTok.

Most of the things that make the official app shit are the things that make it profitable - it just needs to avoid being so shitty as to alienate too many users.