Well, just my guess but as of this morning CS has a leader board of 414 people.

Ranging from those who spend hours a day posting, to those who only made a comment or two and perhaps gave/received kudos.

Even from those 414 ebay can analyse, in greater depth, what type of user responds to which threads or authors a new one.  Which topics get any response either for or against.   How many are 'for' or 'against'.  How many of each get Kudos from other repliers and from others who don't reply.  I'm sure that qualified data analysts (or A.I) can think of even more info. they can glean, from the leader board and the boards in general.

I've always thought that the Community Team takes more from the boards back to ebay management than it's, so often, inconclusive input.  I agree that if A.I proves to be as 'magical' as we are led to believe it will be, the Team's jobs are going to be redundant and yes, the boards could easily go the same way.

But to do that A.I needs the data to sift through, so again hoovering up more data on users becomes more important.    I remember a quote from an amazon exec. (probably many years ago from context),  that "amazon is a data gathering machine that just happens to sell books".  It sometimes looks as though ebay is so intent on data gathering that it's forgotten the part about "selling" anything and all we're here for is to provide them with as much raw data as they can get.

It might even give some credence to theories that our universe is a simulation in an A.I Mind and if it's running more than one simulation, then perhaps we really are in a multiverse ?