Out of the two? Probably the polls. "Active users" is blatantly a weasel metric.
why should a company listen to a gallup poll of ~1,500 people over their own internal metrics?
do you think all types of companies should heed the advice of gallup polls over their own metrics, experience, and research?
A good example of how this works is cocaine.
Capitalism and competition isn't always good governance. It works brilliantly in many places, such as restaurants or commodity goods. It fails completely for medicine or banking. It's in between for tech or education, but it's clearly failing for AI.
hypothetically, you own a widget company. you sell a lot of widgets. every month, you are selling even more widgets. the widgets are flying off the shelves. you keep ramping up production, and the consumers keep on buying.
gallup releases a poll that says "people hate widgets".
would you stop/slow down your widget production?
for the same reason Vladimir Putin should listen to Russian milbloggers rather than his own subordinates, the metrics are being cooked up by people who get promoted for good metrics
Also the shelf metaphor is itself troubled because you're not even really selling any widgets for profit, you're just handing them out for free at the expense of hundreds of billions in investments that really are going to deprecate pretty fast
i think you have severely misunderstood the hypothetical