Yeah. They are giving the users the "privilege" to buy shares at the open market rate. Not even at discounted rates. Again US only. What about the others? They just give their data I suppose.
The users get a service that costs hundreds of millions to maintain for free.
And no one is forcing them to post valuable content without compensation.
Well there's apparently more than 400 million active users every month, so they could charge users a few cent per month and pay for the infrastructure entirely. But they choose to be massive privacy invading assholes.
Yes there'd be less, but the amount is purely speculative and you don't know anymore than I do.
Even if they have to go with the ad-supported model to maintain a large active userbase, that can easily be done without all the tracking. But again, they chose the shittiest option...there's really a pattern of them just being massive assholes. No matter what options they have, they'll apparently go for the shittiest one that screws over the users the most.