Does it rub anyone else the wrong way that you need to have an invite code to use bluesky? I wanted to use it but it just screams elitism to me.

Reddit lives from it's moderators. But nowadays a good AI might replace that, will have a rough start but gradually become better. I still believe the communities will become streamlined and heavily automoderated due to lack of human reason. That will hurt discussion, conversations and though provoking comments.

This is not really possible. How is AI going to moderate small communities? It needs to know what kind of moderator decisions humans make in order to "learn" how to make those decisions but there's not enough data for smaller communities. It's also not useful for moderating video content, content that requires intelligence to get to (e.g. paywalled articles you have to learn how to get around). It would be very expensive to download every PDF submitted to some academic subreddit, and figure out if it is relevant, etc.

AI can only make a good spam filter, but not much more.

The majority of social media sites (with the exception of youtube imo) don't provide anything of value. A smart high school kid could write a twitter clone over a weekend. The only thing these websites have to offer is their large user base.
EDIT: OK, I apparently upset some people. I was exagerating when I said it could be done in a weekend, but my point stands that it's pretty easy to make a twitter clone/reddit clone, and the challenge in succeeding for twitter is getting a user base. The tech is incredibly easy to build.

That doesn't explain it IMO. That data is already freely available and LLMs don't need the latest data. So data scraping for AI makes up a miniscule amount of API usage.

I think it has more to do with inflation. Investors aren't putting their money into risky tech companies as much, and so these companies (twitter, reddit, etc) have to prove they can be profitable for once, and they probably are going to fail to do this. It does mean we can't have nice things for free anymore like API access.

There's no way they cause more damage than what they have done now. The vast majority of users (and eyes on ads, etc) are not going to have accounts. The majority of accounts that might pay money only do so because lots of people (who may not be logged in) see them.

Musk claimed that it's temporary. Either way this is an absolute disaster. This must be costing them insane amounts of money.