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by duped 1097 days ago
I think a large part of it is about controlling the experience of reddit and providing guarantees about how ads get viewed. 3P apps have a very "old.reddit" experience where you only get things in your feed from your subs, with no suggestions. And you can force all posts to be collapsed instead of auto-expanded.

When you browse on the 1P Reddit app you no longer have a curated feed. It's filled with suggestions ("because you visited /r/place-you-dont-sub-to before posts"). And on top of that, controlling whether the view is condensed or as expanded cards does not affect ads. So you'll get a giant "he gets us" jesus ad that takes up half the screen - and if you do something like report an ad, say it's not for you (in my case, I selected something like "it's offensive"), you'll still get the same giant ad.

The Reddit experience they want me to have is not the Reddit experience I'm used to from the 3P apps, and I think that's why they're trying to kill them off. People that want a curated list of forums and a few memes/gifs aren't driving engagement as much as they'd like, so they tried to clone TikTok. And it sucks, so I'm gone after June 30th.