They don’t even want you to use the website I don’t think. They’ve even done experiments where they blocked people from using the mobile website. The more they want me to use their app, the more I want to avoid Reddit all together.
This kind of feature creep was also common in the web2.0 days. Lots of forum plugins were basically “you can have a facebook profile and feed page and a twitter feed, but they’re all wish.com equivalents because they’re locally hosted and can only be seen by the other people on this forum”. These features were generally quite popular too, heck I installed a few on my own forum. Besides money and things, I think it’s enticing to want to make your site into a “one stop” site. Throw in the fact that these are all capitalist hegemons trying to become the next ring to rule them all, and I think you’ve got your answer.
