Comment by gary_0

The whole point of the Internet up until about 2019 was that it was so cheap to host information it was basically free. If your site scaled up, you covered the hosting costs with ads or donations or something. The expensive part was finding content, so "user generated content" sites had to entice users to post stuff. That resulted in an implicit social contract with the users; these sites lived in fear of the users taking their content elsewhere.

Now the Web is expensive for some reason, and users have become so dependent on a small number of sites as a communications medium that the megacorporations running them feel like they have infinite leverage, and the social contract of user-generated content is completely forgotten.