I wish I knew nostr:npub1lrnvvs6z78s9yjqxxr38uyqkmn34lsaxznnqgd877j4z2qej3j5s09qnw5

I lack my usual snark on this subject for the simple reason I think it’s super complex. I don’t see ad supported services as being that way out of malice. I believe some smart guys wanted to build something and get paid for their troubles, and found a way to do so.

It’s a cultural issue. We are used to things being free. People (in generality) aren’t going to pay for something that they can get elsewhere for free, unless they have some other more ideological reason - or as others have mentioned, the service is much better (premium). Among those services with premium offerings, it is a very small percentage of people who opt into this, and overwhelming majority stay free and are carried on the backs of the small premium base. It’s still a mutual benefit, since nobody would want premium if there weren’t tons of people to interact with.

That’s the societal issue with a v4v economy. The majority of users will not give value, since value is provided by others for “free,” and many things of value are also fairly invisible. I posit the average user will not give a damn about your average relay until it’s gone - because it’s invisible.

It’s also worth noting that almost every service that has a premium tier survived *years* of financial loss and riding on VC money to get to that threshold of user base where the 1% of premium users could turn a profit.