Looking at a company’s career page can really reveal its long-term strategy. In this case, Reddit wants to leverage the extraction of wealth generated by its users. This career page caught my eye:

Ads prediction team is the central team to handle machine learning needs in the ads delivery pipeline. Some examples projects that the team own:

• Improve our model through systematic model architecture engineering work including exploring different deep neural network architectures
• Systematic feature engineering work to build power features from Reddit’s data with aggregation, embedding, content understanding techniques
• Developing highly efficient retrieval ranking models with good balance between model performance and computation efficiency

As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer in the ads prediction team, you will research, formulate and execute on our mission to deliver the right ad to the right user under the right context with data and ML driven solutions. Source: https://boards.greenhouse.io/reddit/jobs/4820729

I think Reddit will go through with their API plans no matter what. They want to eliminate all third party apps so that their machine learning algorithm can target appropriate ads to users. They can only do that if users only use their app.