Help me understand: was this a subreddit you participated in for months or longer, before encountering a wave of objectifying comments? Or is it more like, you were a newb to the sub when you started pestering mods about a tone that was already established as normalized there?

It has everything to do with identifying and profiling visitors, but I believe ad revenue is just the cover justification. Social media user profiling has crossed the technological threshold into being of interest to authoritarian states, who are very keen to know who the likely troublemakers are and to neuter social networks as potential channels for resistance organization.

There’s a historical cycle where the helping professions rotate the terminology out, as the wider culture overloads the old terms with insulting usage. Eventually the new vernacular leaks out into general parlance and the cycle cycles. “Retarded” was once acceptable clinical terminology because "idiot, “moron”, and “imbecile” had accumulated cultural baggage. The latter terms were, themselves, once politically correct alternatives to even older terms.

I think it’s naive to think that THIS time is special, and today’s politically correct terminology won’t ever leak out into common usage as a slur too.