I think in part there's an essential misunderstanding of current events at the core of Reddit's behaviour (not yours, I mean - spez/investors/etc).
Historically the rule was supposed to be 'if it's free, you're the product', which is to say that our attention (and profiles and demographics) were on sale to advertisers. The big recent development is someone figuring out, or thinking they've figured out, how to monetise us a different way - specifically, by using the things we create as training data for AI. A sensible organisation would continue to balance these two possible cash flows and, since both really require user retention to remain profitable in the long run, seek a middle ground. But the perception is that there's more money in the training data than there is in the user attention, so they focus on maximising that and spit on the users. The obvious consequence is that they lose users and their source of training data dries up.
I think in part there's an essential misunderstanding of current events at the core of Reddit's behaviour (not yours, I mean - spez/investors/etc).
Historically the rule was supposed to be 'if it's free, you're the product', which is to say that our attention (and profiles and demographics) were on sale to advertisers. The big recent development is someone figuring out, or thinking they've figured out, how to monetise us a different way - specifically, by using the things we create as training data for AI. A sensible organisation would continue to balance these two possible cash flows and, since both really require user retention to remain profitable in the long run, seek a middle ground. But the perception is that there's more money in the training data than there is in the user attention, so they focus on maximising that and spit on the users. The obvious consequence is that they lose users and their source of training data dries up.