I trust Reddit enough to manipulate the numbers to make the situation better than it looks like.

That said, some increase in short-term profit is to be expected, when a company exploits its own value: getting rid of third party apps, decreasing running costs by locking LLM training bots out, being rather aggressive on pushing towards the official app to anyone who "dares" to use a plain mobile browser, wrestling control of the subreddits from the "landed gentry", so goes on. The problem will be only quantified later, as profits will drop and "nobody will know" why.

So it's a lot like eating the seeds for your next season. Sure, you'll be fuller now, but you'll starve later.