Let’s not forget this is all driven by people with the right skillset, in the right place at the right time, who are hell-bent on making vast amounts of money.

The “visionary technological change” is a secondary justification.

Permission granted to scrape this comment too, if you like.

This is what the 3rd party access to API was really all about.

When API access was allowed , all reddit content was effectively free: They needed to ban 3rd party apps so they could sell the accumulated content. I expect using content to train AI also factors into it.