I think you are right as things are today on a broken money system but as bitcoin fixes things and people's purchasing power grows over time rather than being stolen, value for value models will become the norm.
Discussion
The question is: Who is the person paying for value? It's only a subset. We can see that with zaps.
The value for value model leaves the disparity in place; it's just less overt.
What V4V also does is make it more obvious that it's services that need to be paid for, even more than content.
Lots of people will upload a video of themselves playing guitar, or an essay they've written, even if nobody pays them to, as they get something emotional out of the interchange and they can leverage the attention into a concert, book signing, or something.
But the person running the infrastructure just has that and it needs to be paid for, or he'll eventually stop or reduce the quality of the service, or use his control of the market for some third purpose.
Very true, most normies are so used to getting their services for free they don't even care it's at the cost of their souls.
They have inadvertently become slaves to these "free" platforms and drive their growth by being food for the algorithm. Google and X I'm looking at you.
There was a great clip of nostr:nprofile1qyxhwumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmvqyehwumn8ghj7mnhvvh8qunfd4skctnwv46z7ctewe4xcetfd3khsvrpdsmk5vnsw96rydr3v4jrz73hvyu8xqpqsg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q8dzj6n doing the rounds a while back where he described it perfectly.
Most people don't actually mind being slaves. Our growth potential is the 5% or so, of the population, that actually minds. That's still a whole lot of people. 12.5 million adults, just within the US.
The percentage is probably much lower, outside of the USA, but 0.5% of 8 billion people is 40 million people.
The math checks out. Even capturing a tenth of that market, and getting a tenth of those people to subscribe or zap, is enough to sustain the effort, since Nostr running costs are unusually light, through the wide distribution.
The only projects that will struggle are the ones with oversized budgets, as they'll be expected to offer a return on the investment in the medium term, and they'll need a gigantic market for that, as margins are so thin.
Those sheep will follow once the new paradigm sets in and the current one is totally unsustainable.
My thinking here is that once you have a truly free market enabled by bitcoin, we will have an abundance of the things we need and that unlocks the v4v model.
Currently everyone is working stupid hours and scraping their money together so the idea of giving someone money for something they put out for free seems absurd.
Maybe. But this place is full of mega-rich Bitcoiners and most of the biggest zappers, subscribers, volunteers, and donors, are relatively poor people. The broad middle class usually ends up paying for everything, in the end. Even the funds are eventually just spending their contributions, as the big donations start to run out.
The plus side is that the middle class is the one with the least slave-mentality, so we'll tend to have a disproportionate amount of them on here.