[srslack]

I think they have, and they just don’t give a shit. The TikTok/Twitter/political hot take repost sewer of /r/all can practically be automated. The value they see is advertisements to those who consume that drivel, and the high value of enterprise (firehose access), not (say) modifying the API to serve ads to users of /r/AskHistorians.

If Spez had an honest bone in his body, he’d have just said they don’t want the API for third party clients anymore, for the plebs or the “Landed gentry”, and that they want to shift towards the enterprise focus of reselling that firehose of garbage because apparently you can make an LLM out of it! The money has stopped, and we're not profitable, so the time and capital required to add advertisements and targeting to the public API versus whatever crap they’ve built out over the last few years doesn’t make any financial sense.

When they can just sell the firehose of garbage instead. Of course.