A number of years ago, they stopped recommending and teaching tourniquets because they were concerned about people losing limbs unnecessarily if tourniquets were to be applied unnecessarily.
However, then the Boston Marathon bombing occurred and the California nightclub shooting and they realized that they had made a tragic mistake because a lot of people lost their lives when they could have been saved.
So now, tourniquets are once again recommended and taught.
There is an option that reddit has zero ability to stop:
If redditors band together and commit to boycott any company who advertises through reddit until reddit reverses their changes.
Companies have been very careful about trying to not get tied into the protests. But now we make it so that reddit is poisoned fruit.
There is nothing reddit can do to stop this. No rules they can change to subvert it, because we can publicize this boycott on any and every other platform if they try to silence us.
Boycott companies that advertise through reddit, and that will throw a major wrench in their current income as well as further sour their IPO prospects.
You’re ignoring the other effects of third party apps - which is to have significantly added to the number of users they have to show ads to in the first place.
Making their API free encouraged active development which increased user engagement. So it absolutely did increase their revenue because it helped to increase the popularity of their site in the first place.
JFC, the answer to your question is literally the first sentence of the article. It would have taken you less time to read it then to post your question.