am I wrong in thinking that the users are the product and advertisers the customer?
I think there was/is a monetization route through the use of user data (probably why they’re pushing their app so much) as well as using all the data for things like language AI modeling.
But on that last one it seems like the biggest players such as openAI and Microsoft already scraped their site freely. Not sure if they’ve missed a big chunk of that opportunity by now
I have developed the impression, and it’s mostly just my hunch not so much evidence based - spez and co are kind of kicking themselves for being oblivious to the AI training rush and failing to monetize on it. Probably didn’t even realize it was happening until we all did via crazy headlines showing up in news about what AI could do. That kind of thing may lead to kneejerk decisions on api access