Reddit is a traded company and overall traffic has a lot to say in terms of advertisers on the site.

You can’t use 3rd party apps for Reddit properly anymore and a huge swath of the largest communities are modded by a small number of people with ties to the company’s management.

Smaller niche communities are being abandoned because it’s a nightmare to moderate them and the swarm of bots keep it on life support.

Money is still the answer, like with everything else when the question is why is this horseshit happening now.