What's the root cause of all the recent reddit tumult? Is it essentially that reddit is trying to keep away web scrapers so it can retain exclusive access to it

What's the root cause of all the recent reddit tumult? Is it essentially that reddit is trying to keep away web scrapers so it can retain exclusive access to its data and sell to LLM companies? If so, this seems like an impulsive miscalculation, based on how easy it would be for any determined actor to scrape reddit. So why annoy users in order to attempt to do something that has a high probability of failure? The situation sounds a lot like news website paywalling circa 2010, which was a flop for most sites.