The factory farm doesn't hate the chickens, they do the bare minimum to keep them alive and productive.

It used to be better. Now it seems to be spiraling down the drain.

Oh, and yeah, like Steve said: money.

Money

Reddit is containment for normies to generate LLM training data, but also a possible temporary stop for people on their journey out of friendface, twitter, insta, etc. like my senior mother.

I'm thrilled she is off of those other platforms now, and there's still lots of time for her to make her own conclusions for Reddit, and she will.

Reddit taught me to never trust anything Y Combinator shits out, ever.

it's terrible yes, but still much better than facebook/instagram/tiktok/xitter/whatever. although they're almost gone now they still do kinda have a working api, third party apps and old reddit..

It wasn't created like that. It became it gradually as enshittification in the name of next quarter's earnings kept progressing.

it's not even letting me log in now. very hostile.

Isn't most of it copying what other sites do like Facebook?
I think they are doing it so they can better monetize it, and they are under the delusion that they have as much leverage as Facebook does.

Facebook does it and gets away with it, because it has an actual practical use for some people that is hard to replace.
Reddit on the other hand is nothing more than a glorified forum. So for reddit it may be stupidity, because they don't understand the limits of what they can do without destroying the site.

I bet the login requirement is to prevent scraping, to force companies that want to use it for AI training to pay.
But I'm no expert, maybe that doesn't even work?

But for sure it's an attempt to increase the value of the data that is on reddit, and to improve monetization.
It seems to me that that has been the only goal for reddit for years.

But maybe I'm wrong, maybe reddit will actually manage to figure out ways to monetize the site without killing it, where for instance Twitter failed although they were getting closer near the end.

I dont know. The rules are so confining and strict that i literally got an account site wide ban every few months.. sometimes longer but no matter what i always got a ban.

Dont confuse publicly owned reddit to privatly owned reddit. They are two entitely different entities with entirely different goals.