Steam is an unusual case, because games are running software and can't be trivially reproduced in their unencoded form. The publishers can include copy protection, network connection requirements, or even run essential parts of game logic on their own servers. So free downloads became a much worse experience over time.

The edge-hangers have two good choices: They can be very visibly present and then join the conversation when an opportunity presents itself, or they can leave.

Social-media edge-hangers don't have to do anything, they can just hang there forever without clearly joining or leaving the group.

In a sense you're slowly building the LLM in your head, but it's more valuable there because of the much-better idea evaluation, and lack of network/GPU overhead.

The developer's incentive is to control the experience for a mix of the users' ends and the developer's ends. Functionality being what users want and monetization being what developers want. Devs don't expose APIs for the same reason why hackers want them - it commodifies the service.

An AI-first app only makes sense if the developer controls the AI and is developing the app to sell AI subscriptions. An independent AI company has no incentive to support the dev's monetization and every incentive to subvert it in favor of their own.

(EDIT: This is also why AI agents will "use" mice and keyboards. The agent provider needs the app or service to think they're interacting with the actual human user instead of a bot, or else they'll get blocked.)