When billionaire fascists start being held to account, they lash out.

While these changes will eventually happen, as all of these companies are meant to make a profit from the start. The reason they're all happening now is because of the coming recession, or at least the believe that it will come.

Companies expect infinite profit growth

Cheap/free money has dried up.

Oh you thought the end goal was to make a good website. Hahaha.

There are a lot of reasons for this general trend, but let me add my two cents to make a case for the sudden influx of user-opposed changes:

I don't have a source for this, but I remember that Linus spoke about this on the LTT WAN-Show. Basically, abunch of big silicon valley investors are pulling out of all of the big platforms, therefore leaving them with a huge hole in their profitability. This means, that right now a lot of them are scrambling to scrape together more money over time, so all of those platforms are sustainable.

Obviously this has to observed in conjunction with all of those are trends that are already mentioned by other comments, but this gives more basis as to why now, and why to this extent.

If someone else knows what I'm talking about please add quotes and sources because I don't like the good old 'dude trust me' guarantee one bit.

YouTube can try lol. But they've never cared about users. They're just all at about the same point where they have to stop pretending in order to feed that capitalism machine (or try to at least). It looks like hostility, but it's just them finally being honest.

Money is tighter since the inflation affects VC and stupid money flowing in. Stock prices are not going up, people have no money to play with (see the death of NFTs at the same time, the definition of a stupid investment).

Because users are not the customer but the product for others. And with network effects meaning there's less competition (ie no place to go to), then they no longer have to attempt to appease the product and can focus on appeasing customers.

Because usually the greed, money and power corrupts, no matter how good you are in the beginning.

They forget the users are their base, not their employees, or are bought by idiot billionaires who think they can turn the platform I to another money printer (or tax write-off)

Spez in particular saw Twitter and thought that would be a great idea.

I don't think he understands he's about to be CEO of Tumblr 2.0

Others have basically captured it, but my read is a massive change in the overall risk profile held by venture capital firms. The time of reckoning has come, and it’s time for everyone’s (or at least VCs’) favourite three letters: ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).

The last twenty years, we’ve seen this sort of spray-and-pray model, where 99 bad investments could be offset by 1 “unicorn”. The risk appetite seems to have shifted largely because 1.) there’s a higher volume of early stage concepts (so there’s more bad ideas), and 2.) there’s either fewer unicorns, or the unicorns that mature are ultimately less valuable.

Crunchbase put out a good analysis of the current trend of global venture dollar flow:

The Party’s Still Over: The VC Downturn In 6 Charts

You can read news from various outlets - some say it’s a post-pandemic correction. Some say it’s because labour is too expensive. But the bottom line is that VCs aren’t willing to spend money on “users-in-lieu-of-revenue” like they once were, and I honestly don’t blame them. There were a lot of really, egregiously stupid ideas coming out of SV, and their wax wings melted. sad_trombone.mp4

Adam Kotsko summed this entire phenomena up nicely:

Their cash overlords want returns on their investments.

The answer is AI. Amongst other things. Reddit is about to go public and wants everyone on their main app for advertising and tracking. Twitter is dealing with hosting issues with Google.

Plus AI companies are extracting content from Twitter and Reddit to train their AI models like chatGPT which is a huge money maker, and these platforms aren't getting any money from it so they're trying to make it more difficult to get access to it. They want companies like OpenAI and Stability and Microsoft and Google to pay large sums of money for access to their content to train AI on.

It's not anything new and nothing "all of a sudden", unfortunately. Facebook, Tumbler, Google - all done stuff like that before. Even for Reddit this is not the first protest blackout and not the first time they treat users and mods like garbage.

It simply is now happening to the apps and services you (and I) use daily, so it hits closer home.

All modern stairs are built on the same terrible foundation: Attract users, no matter how much money you lose. Once you feel strong, introduce fees, ads, hike the prices and try to regulate years of financial loss.

Happened like clockwork, and companies going public are a clear sign it's just around the corner. (Kind of like any free mobile app will ask you for a 5 star review, just before introducing monetization schemes)

Just wait till you have to pay per email. You're not still using Gmail are you?

It's all about the money, money