I suspect that Reddit has miscalculated here, or is just gunning to manipulate the apparent user metrics ahead of the IPO, but it seems to me that they actively want to shed everyone who is privacy-conscious, tech-literate, etc. They don’t want conversations about old.reddit or 3rd party apps or the fediverse influencing those who are unaware of these things, and they don’t want users or moderators who will organise against Reddit They already have power mods who have been running large numbers of the most popular subreddits for years and some of these may be paid admin; they’d find it easy to get people to replace the head mods of smaller communities, and they probably don’t care about the niche subreddits and will either let those die or trial the use of bot moderators on them.

Yeah that much is obvious to me. Every platform has a turning point when the investors smell the money and ask why it is not making more money. And then they will do everything to make that happen. Every change they make is about ads. You control the conversation, you can sell more ads, that is all this is. They don't like 3rd party apps anymore, because they can't sell ads on them. The reddit app is full of ads. Same with old reddit, not enough ads. The whole redesign was hated so much because the purpose of it is to show more ads, not to make reddit better.

Reddit is on this path for a few years and now they are trying to throw out the opposition to replace them with yes-men.