I've run into this yesterday, and was puzzled not to be able to find any news about the change back then!
It really does suck, and I wonder about the timing coinciding with the shutdown of Reddit APIs; yet another site full of useful content taking its toys and going home. š
Economy is a huge driving factor to these decisions.
This is largely due to the unusually low interest rate environment weāre used to in the past 20+ years. With the low interest rates, everyone at all levels are taking on more loans. US Govt just uncapped the debt ceiling recently so they could borrow more; companies are used to getting āfreeā money from investors who take on cheap loans in hopes for a big payout; individuals are leveraging more and more into mortgages because property values go up, and dammit Iām working full time and I demand annual international vacations.
All these money pumped into the system is creating more opportunities to earn more, which results in more spending (thatās partially driven by the ever growing of loans), which leads to the higher rate of inflation. And to tame that inflation, the only tool weād have at our disposal is to dial up the interest rate.
Higher interest rate leads to lesser money floating around; on the corporate side, it means lesser free money from investors because theyāre no longer getting the cheap loans. As result of that, companies have to try to extract more out of what theyāve already got to keep things a float. More ads, less freebies/discounts, increasing costs, etc. are just the beginning. Pretty soon, those with less than solid business model will be unable to keep their entire staff and even larger rate of layoffs will follow, followed by eventual closures.
Thereās no push back on this; individual push back or not, the companies are more likely to answer to their shareholdersā demand for profit than usersā demand for things of what was. More and more companies will follow suit and/or go under. Whatās coming isnāt going to be pretty, sadly.