it has nothing to do with users or a third party mobile app being better than reddit's dogshit mobile app.

it's that reddit is now requiring payment for the API, which greatly impacts the business model of the powermods. you mock the jannies, and some of them are keyboard warrior losers, but some of them are making shitloads of money on this.

if you want to dig, look up /r/banbanouts. the /r/banout2018 sub where they were organizing it was banned, and they moved to discord.

in 2016 when trump won, a political extremist group started a coordinated effort to take over reddit. the powermods control over 90% of the top 10k subs, and over 60% of the top 100k subs. they're very well funded with political activism groups like mediamatters. it's confirmed true as memos from these groups and discord chat logs leaked covering it.

these powermods use a very sophisticated censorship system to make it impossible for anything that's anti-leftist to propagate on the site. any subs which do engage in wrongspeak get false flagged and banned.

with the API changes, the powermods are claiming it's over a third party reddit mobile app, but it's because the censorship system used by the political powermods doesn't qualify under the moderation tool exemption, and suddenly it'd cost many millions every month to run.

now the powermods are throwing a tantrum, holding the site hostage from the business, with neither side wanting to admit what is actually going on. reddit doesn't want to admit that they are pwned by a small group of extremists, and the extremists don't want to expose who they are, what they're doing, how they're making millions, and how the whole thing will collapse if they are forced to pay reddit a monthly fee to control the narrative on the site.