I imagine it's quite well aligned with their goals of getting increased user engagement metrics from increased clicks to read stuff from casual browsers to the

I imagine it's quite well aligned with their goals of getting increased user engagement metrics from increased clicks to read stuff from casual browsers to the site, and convincing regular users they should download the app Of course it's extremely badly aligned with their regular user's goals of reading comments, but that's solved by using the old.reddit urls if not the app, whilst the casual browser coming in from Google or a link gets the full on contempt for users' desire to actually read threads UX until they've bumped the user engagement metrics up by clicking on more stuff.