Websites have to search for new revenue streams. They don't just walk into a corner of the internet and think "drat, someone already has a forum for that!" and walk away. They come up with some unique twist people won't have normally thought of and run with that until it stops working. See this guy's comment below:

• https://lemmy.world/post/50436416/25191964

With reddit they need to be able to show that their advertisers aren't just serving ads to bots (although we're seeing ads for bots now apparently). They have to prove a certain number of real human beings saw something thus the login requirement.

Now, people used old reddit because new reddit sucks. New reddit just shows you the top few posts, and makes you expand replies, thus proving you're something they can bill for. This also serves the purpose of pushing nuanced, long running discussion down to where people don't see it. Just look at the cat picture, upvote it, and move on.

And for the record reddit has been crap for a very long time. At least since whoever that lame ass admin was who went into the backend database and edited someone's raw post, and if not then, then Victoria getting the axe should've been a red flag to everyone that you weren't a member of reddit...not really. I know there were some local meetups in that timeframe. How awkward do you think the AMA local BBQ was? Do you think reddit cares?

You cannot assume that the people making decisions are rational, smart, people. They may believe falsehoods, and act accordingly. They may be chasing a hidden goal (eg: "I get a bonus if I hit X metric, so I'll kill good parts of the site to do it")

I worked at a place where management was like "we want to increase time on site", and the lead dev was like "I can just add loading spinners everywhere then". Luckily management was a little smarter and move involved than that, and didn't approve that strategy.