Or, like, I dunno… maybe explore pivoting the monetization model towards selling publicly available and scrapeable user conversations as training data for ML, since ML as a discipline is exploding now?

To be blunt, despite my dislike of companies using my data for that sort of thing, I did give Reddit shittons of comments over nearly a decade, so that’s on me. It has been available for public scraping pretty much since the inception of the platform. Spez could have worked with actual engineers and legal experts to figure out a legal, sustainable way to update the ToS and API to reflect that new monetization model, with honestly minimal disruption to any user.

But no - they wanted the quick cash grab instead of a sustainable long-term investment, because late stage capitalism, and now we’re here.