When you post on reddit, instagram etc. you're giving the company your valuable data. (And it often is valuable, you put your thoughts into it and all that). Consider if you take 15 minutes to create value content, you'd get paid $5 or sth if you were doing it commercially. Now all that value is donated to big tech companies. (that's the only reason why they have value at all.)
So what's the problem with that? The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I'm not joking. Look at these:
when i want to see content on reddit (for research) or instagram (for local community) they don't allow me to see the data that users have contributed. Reddit claims that it blocks VPNs for "security reasons", meanwhile i'm using VPNs in browser's incognito mode to not be tracked. Instagram wants you to sign in sothat they amass more users and can take leverage of the network effect even more.
I can understand restricting who can post to limit bot activity, but reading must always be possible. After all, it's our data. That's exactly what happens when you give your data to big companies to "communicate with other people": your data becomes a source of income for them, at our expense.
I was on a few narrow interest subs. I mean really narrow interest. There were folk they'd turn to for reliable historical analysis, folk they'd turn to for reliable cultural analysis, I was one of their data crunchers (I could basically find the line entries that looked wrong and the folk who had time to do more in depth forensic bullshit could dig into them) I mean on one of those narrow interest subs some people thought they were taking down a cult, I just helped shine a light on things. And learned about cults of course, can't start a good cult without knowing how the toxic ones work