Seems to me like they priced the API to cash in on the LLM training data gold rush, and as a side-effect it makes third-party user apps infeasible. Oops.
>>phendr+(OP)
They priced the API for LLM training and killing third-party apps is just a great bonus. If they wanted to retain third-party apps while protecting their revenue stream they could have simply created a new free API including all the ads. They deliberately chose to kill these apps.
>>dontre+E3
You can throttle APIs so they are still useful for a human browsing content, but essentially worthless for scraping meaningful amounts of data.
You can also detect accounts that are displaying scraping behavior and block them.
>>bluefi+he
An LLM only has to download text once. You could easily coordinate a scrape across various IPs and accounts over the course of a couple of months and it would be really hard to detect. Especially if you target alternate GUI api based versions of the site.