Yeah, this article got a rare audible chuckle out of me. I used reddit for eleven years and in that time their internal search was always a waste of time. Google and Microsoft can train their little chat bots without Reddit. Reddit absolutely will not survive without Google and Bing search results.
They dont want it to be a website random people use once or twice.
They want it to be a locked down walled garden like Facebook or LinkedIn where if you want to see anything, you need to make an account to inflate numbers, for people to open up the official app so they can't leave easily.
Yeah, I think you're right about that. They've been doing it on mobile to push people toward the official app for quite awhile so it would make sense that fully walling off the desktop website is on the horizon as well. Anything to create the illusion of value before the IPO.