[nostrademons]

Of course it's not in the long-term monetary interest of big tech to force users into subpar experiences. Nobody cares about the long-term at a public company, because you can just sell your stocks as long as doom is at least a quarter away. In many cases the subpar user experiences are in service of short-term monetary interests, which the stock market (and by extension, your management chain) very much cares about. It also probably doesn't matter all that much, as the only thing that matters in business is transactions, and relatively few users are going to quit using Reddit because the client sucks compared to the third-party options.

The "here, run ads in your third-party app and we'll give you a cut" business model has been tried, and is actually pretty successful. Try for example AdSense or an Android F2P game or AdMob. The difference is that the app itself is usually branded separately from the ad network, so users know they are using the 3rd party app and not the main service. I think that's the main concern for say a 3rd-party Twitter or Reddit client - at some point a critical mass of users start to think of say RIF as "Reddit", what's stopping them from redirecting their client at a new service and cutting off the real Reddit backend? This was basically how Imgur started, as "Image hosting for Reddit" and then they became a site in their own right.