It doesn’t matter to current leadership of reddit how many people it pisses off. For every user of third-party apps, there are now 10 bots and sockpuppet accounts it gets to count as active users.
And that is exactly how you blow the roof off your IPO. Alphabet and Meta have been lying about their user engagement numbers for decades at this point. “Impressions” are all self-reported and they have zero incentive to be honest. Reddit’s VC money is begging Spez to get into this game before the IPO. For all they lies they are saying out loud, this is the quiet one.
Companies start out with a simple plan to generate revenue via providing a service worth paying for, but they all end up falling victim to Goodhart’s law.
Social media is an interesting case study in how the pursuit of perpetually increasing profits through metrics can make them become oblivious to the fact they don’t really produce any useful product, and that they are wholly reliant upon charity to survive.
They only care if revenue go up and cost go down - so instead of creating legitimate value for those who feed them content, they psychopathically take the path of least resistance and lie about the metrics.
The fact that anything a company says is believed is baffling, but that’s a separate discussion.