I mean in the reddit case the business reason is "monetize the platform as much as possible", which clashes with a platform that's nothing without its users and the content they create. A good business strategy would be to build trust and have dialog and increase monetization in small steps that the majority of the userbase can tolerate (after all people understand that things cost money).

By taking a huge jump to early on and shitting on volunteers/3rd party app developers, they lost what little trust they had. Doubly sad that the same playbook played out with Digg and showed reddit exactly what not to do.