They see how much money Google and Apple are making selling your data and want a bigger cut so they need to make it so they're the only source of data extraction then your data is more valuable.
They used to release new weapons putting them on sale in their cash shop for the first week and during this time they would be extremely overpowered ruining gameplay and incentivising everyone to use the new meme gun. The moment the sale ended they released a balance patch nerfing it into obscurity. That was their business model right up until they just abandoned the project entirely to hop on the MOBA bandwagon.
Do not trust this company to do anything beyond what's best for them especially at the cost of you.
Have you checked your bashrc file to see if the aliases are just commented out? I feel like it comes standard with bash but not every distro enables it by default.
Agreed, I think they're hedging on the amount of people who leave will be less than the increased revenue of those who stay. Considering the ones leaving were never going to allow as revenue anyway what do they really lose?
Google took a novel approach of trying to give people a free product that had value to them and features they wanted in a way that was easy to use. Such a product gave a better experience and only at the cost of someone looking over their shoulder, something that people have grown accustomed from their governments.
More than likely it's a bot farm hired by a public relations firm. Bot farms create bots every day and then assign them tasks to repost popular content and then reply using popular comments under different bots all so they can build up credibility and look like a real user. So then when they are put to a task you can have a single user welding the influence of hundreds or thousands to control the narrative.
Reddit is famously saturated in those bots and this place is likely no different but on a smaller scale made even easier by the instance system.
Especially when it seems most were artificially inflated.