they still have a lot to gain by killing the 3rd party apps and forcing the remaining users to the platform that will benefit their valuation the most. the pricing is to court the big whales to sell data to and the forcing people to use the native app is to improve the quality of the data they want to sell.

I think it's simply that they want to funnel all of their users to official channels. All of this "discussion" is a poorly veiled attempt at public justification. 30 days notice at the quoted price tag was very intentional. My hope is that Reddit seriously miscalculated the amount of damage this would cause. My suspicion is that /u/spez doesn't care and is willing to nuke the site for a one-time payout at maximum valuation.

This is what happens when a bunch of MBAs are detached from the product they're working on.