They’re no longer interested in driving traffic to the site, is my guess. They’re far more interested in devising new ways to extract rents from the existing participant base. So rather than pay Google to prioritize their site, or incentivize Google to link to their site with internal content hygenie techniques, now they’re getting paid by Google to exclusively serve up content.
It’s useless.
The sheer volume of junk content, the amount of content that just shows up as deleted or archived, and the rate at which I’m served “Reddit” as a source of data when there’s no conceivable reason why it should be near the top of my search list is very frustrating.