Why did Foursquare cross streams with Swarm?

Now almost all of that has been undone with leaderboards following the re-emergence of mayorships; the only real difference is that these features are not available in the Foursquare app but, rather, the Swarm app.

So … has Swarm become Foursquare? Why bother with all the changes in the first place? One interpretation of this reversal is that it’s an acknowledgement that gamification drove Foursquare’s usage early on and that, without it, people are hard pressed to use it directly instead of competitors or services that integrate Foursquare’s location data.