WaPo article: https://archive.is/wip/sgViP
Company owner Elon Musk tweeted that the change was a “temporary emergency measure” to deter third-party scraping of data from the social media platform. “We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” Musk wrote.
User "elonmusk" not found
Part of the reason I'm personally sympathetic to Elon is that he comes off as this highly opinionated nerd. And being a highly opinionated nerd myself I can't help but sympathize with one of my kind.
Except I don't have like $100 Billion and he does, so as a general rule I'm incapable of putting my money where my mouth is nearly to the same extent as Elon can.
And you're right: these giant online forums like twitter and reddit are never meant to be profitable as forums because that makes no sense. They're meant to shape opinion and are valuable on that basis alone. And if you're trying to run one of these things as an honest-to-god public forum where people can give their honest opinion, that's going to conflict with the goals of a site trying to shape public opinion.
I don't have 100 billion dollars, but I'm still right all the time. If people don't want to use that, and who could blame them, be my guest. It's occasionally frustrating but mainly no skin off my back.