why does Reddit want us to use the official app so badly?
They don't even want you to use the website I don't think. They've even done experiments where they blocked people from using the mobile website. The more they want me to use their app, the more I want to avoid Reddit all together.
Money. It's always just money.
Just from using reddit, I can only really see a few ways for them to make money.
Subscriptions/awards. Not many people do this, certainly not enough to keep the doors open.
Advertisements
Selling user data
Let's start with 2. The reason they re-designed the UI in both the app and the desktop version is because they need to create as much space as possible for them to put ads into- and still have it not be so annoying for the user that they stop using the site. Now, on the website they can still put adds on old.reddit, just not as many- so they haven't come for that yet, because it isn't draining nearly as much income as the mobile market. Their new mobile app does the same as the frontend redesign- it maximizes ad space, and also allows them to collect other user data such as location to sell to marketing agencies.
ALL of the alternative Reddit clients (or at least, all I have used) have adblocker built into them. For some of them, you pay the app for that- a payment which is often less than Reddit Gold is, and is usually a one-time payment. And these apps hold the user data that can actually be sold, like location. So third-party apps disrupt all three of Reddit's possible revenue streams by having people not pay for premium to hide ads, by blocking advertisements anyway and denying Reddit the ad revenue for them, and by keeping the user's data away from Reddit.
That's why I think they made the API price so ridiculously high- it isn't just meant to scare them away, it's meant to be a reflection of what they feel they are losing in revenue from users using third party apps. If it was just about any one of the 3 points above, the rate would be much more reasonable- but it's all 3.
Because they want to go public and get as much money as possible. They won’t be able to do that unless they demonstrate that they can monetise their platform.
It wants to keep control of how people get access to its data. The recent massive surge of interest in A.I.s means that there's a lot of people looking for good quality datasets to train new models. Reddit is sitting on a goldmine, and it currently handing out gold nuggets for free.
It wants to charge these desperate users of its data through the nose for that access, and $12,000 per 50M API calls is the market rate it has determined (and it is clearly comfortable that existing commercial users of its data such as marketers will also pay those rates).
The fact that this will kill third party clients is just the icing on the cake. If reddit wanted to kill such clients it would just turn off voting and comments in the API.
AI datasets can be built by scrubbing web content and doesn't require API access.
This is about making sure Reddit controls the user experience and users can't, say, block their ads or hide Reddit awards. It's also a cold (and short-sighted) calculation: some people are making money from our product without sharing our costs, better kill them.
Reddit wants to show ads and to collect user data.
Money. Not only can they better monetize it, it makes their numbers look better for the potential IPO.