Every for-profit business needs to earn money somehow, and if you're just "that service that reddit users use for uploading and viewing images", it's really hard to justify your existence in the first place.

And then of course, you add in VC-investments, and suddenly you have external parties forcing you to start extracting as much value from users as you possibly can.

Basically, the same story as with every other enshittificated company that happened so far.