Right now I’m on Damus and the relays I’m connected to are all free. And I’m not getting any spam (I don’t really look at the global public feed). So if one of the first incentives of a paid relay is to reduce spam, I’m already spam-free, so I have less of an incentive.
Discussion
Yeah the clients have mostly stopped showing Global from public relays. The issue is if public relays continue to be overrun by spam they won't be able to maintain performance without some kind of external funding, which goes back to the current model issue with big tech and social media. If it's not grass roots funded, you're beholden to the funders. Either that or the public relays will just die out because there's no incentive to maintain them due to all the spam.
The other question I have is this: If I add paid relays, and they come to the same feed as the free ones, how will I know which notes are coming from where? How can I appreciate the work the relay operator is doing to keep spam out of my feed, or deliver notes that are interesting to me if i can’t tell where specific notes come from ? I still haven’t figured this part out, but seems a great opportunity for simple UX to show which feed a specific note comes from. Although now that I think of it - I’m connected to 10 free relays - and when I send a note, which relays is delivering that note? All of the relays?
NostrGram will show you the relays a note was seen on, but it takes a couple of clicks (one on the ellipsis below the note and another on the Note Info icon). In theory if you're connected to 10 free relays and they're all receiving the writes then they're all indexing your notes.