Specifically infinite/increasing-growth capitalism.

They need to grow profits/value. These social media tech companies have about saturated potential user base. People are foreseeing a slow-down in ad budgets, and user-data is becoming a commodity. These realities, plus the need to drive up profits, leaves these companies with “no choice” but to seek more and more user-hostile features and rent-seeking behavior to satisfy investors. This was probably a long time coming, and was sorta delayed by valuation gains via an overpriced market. Now the investor love affair with tech has cooled a bit, and they’re asking more for hard-profit on the balance sheets.

The other thing that is ripping through social media platforms is a kind of ‘outrage’ or FOMO among leadership that LLM builders like OpenAI are eating lunch at their table by consuming their user content for training. This feeds into the previous point because they think that their users content can be a product of its own beyond attracting more users or being leveraged by ads. I am not so sure about this because these companies have already gotten their ‘lunch’ if they wanted it, and I am dubious about the value of a model built on data as provided by Reddit’s finest minds, and these platforms have patently failed to stop disinformation bots (which will get worse from these LLMs). But who knows.