Reddit's cofounder Steve Huffman said in its early days he filled up most of the site with content using different accounts until it got more users.
Now the social media platform is aiming for an IPO in the first quarter of 2024 with a valuation of $15 billion, and has been in talks with potential investors like Goldman Sachs and and Morgan Stanley, per Bloomberg.
Reddit executives reasoned that the changes were needed to prevent companies, especially artificial intelligence startups creating large language models, from using Reddit’s data for free. With rumors of an imminent IPO swirling, the company is under pressure to make money – and CEO Huffman has acknowledged as much, stating at the time of the change: “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.”
Yes, that is literally the plan.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/dec/30/reddit-moderator-protest-communities-social-media?