"Free" can't indeed be put back in its cage, but this would also apply to real-life, and yet the majority of people don't go out stealing/robbing people even though it would technically allow them to get goods for free that they otherwise would need to pay for.

The problem isn't advertising in itself. The problem is that the law hasn't caught up (or doesn't want to catch up, thanks to corruption/lobbying by vested interests) with cracking down on large-scale non-consensual data collection (which we used to call spyware).

Ads are fine. The problem is that apparently ads don't pay enough and the advertising/data collection industry is engaging in unethical and potentially illegal practices of large-scale stalking (without informed consent) to try and get extra money.

> "The problem is that apparently ads don't pay enough..."

ads pay plenty, just look at the size of google and facebook (granted, they've together largely consolidated the online advertising market, but it's still huge). greed is the simpler answer here.

> It's at least partly cultural. We'll pay for hosting, or internet access. Why won't we pay for other services if they're valuable to us?

1. Too many separate subscriptions become hard to manage. Example: the banks in my country don't allow direct access of my account movements to any budgeting apps so I have to tally everything manually because I want to track my expenses. There is a business idea here somewhere: a subscription aggregator or some such, where you can manage a total subscription budget per month and be able to cut a service easily (which is of course strongly against the interests of those you subscribed to).

2. Cynicism. I have physically met and conversed with people working in ad-tech. They have zero scruples. If you pay for a service these people will laugh at you, collect your money and then proceed to inject trackers and huge banners in the website/app with no regard that you paid for the service. You don't magically disappear from tracking once you pay. That's sadly a myth. Your narrative is correct on its surface but it was perverted and abused.

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I agree that the free tier services is like running a charity and not everyone feels like they have to. There is a business opportunity for a better model of free trials and NOT to automatically subscribe you after a week or a month. Whether that new model is in the financial interest of the gatekeepers (Apple / Google and the apps in their stores) is another discussion entirely, though.

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Finally, I am OK paying a few more bucks a month to my ISP. So let all those services figure out a way to charge the ISPs. I'll gladly pay anywhere from $5 to $50 extra a month for everything that I consumed that is viewed as non-free.

Paypal can manage subscriptions and cut them off just don't expect them to give your money back in a timely fashion. I got ripped off by the New York Times glitchy interactions and it took months to give some of the money back.

Yes, that's the problem right there -- incredible amount of dark patterns when you just want to unsub. This puts me off and I skipped a good amount of subs to popular services because of these horror stories.

That, plus PayPal is ripping you off with currency conversions.

The problem is majority doesn't care about tracking regardless of free or paid. And the MBAs will push for as hard monetization as possible.

True. Hence at one point we all have to own the problem and start standing behind our ideals.

>On the other hand: the whole reason that shady, dark pattern, privacy killers like disqus exist is because people won't pay for stuff.

Not only for that. Also because they can make extra money off of it.

So no reason to not have "shady, dark pattern, privacy killers" even to services your customers pay for.

It's because of a focus on quality and responsibility that you don't do it, not because "we already make money since our service is non-free, so let's leave the extra ad money on the table".

It's more fulfilling to offer the service for free than to have a handful of paying customers and watch the world fall into a monopoly of moderation by Big Tech.

My software Remarkbox is now free for all after having tried to sell it to people.

Reference: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....

I've been thinking about that a bit recently, for a product I'm building where I'd also like to offer a free tier, but at the same time I'm afraid that it's too much of a hassle.

I'm wondering if an open subsidized approach could work: E.g. for every paid user you allow 100 (or at whatever threshold) users to sign up for the free tier. Possible one could also set up a monthly donation system that directly goes towards financing free accounts.

I'm sure something like that has been tried, but I haven't really been able to find any good examples for that.

So it depends a bit on what you are hosting, but a real concern for myself at least is the value that free users bring to your service.

I'm not talking about the costs of running your service to support them, but everything else. A part of your free userbase will expect the world for free and start demanding more, and as they outnumber your paid users by so much it can just be a huge distraction. The question is how many of these free users will convert to paying users?

I personally add a free tier to my products because I want to make the tool accessible to hobby and other small projects without a budget, but it's probably not a good business decision.

Something I've been considering: charge some small one-time payment, say $10, for a lifetime 'try-out' plan. Then when they want to upgrade to a subscription you give them that $10 as a discount for their subscription. It may filter those users that will never upgrade anyway.

Check out the pay-want-you-can model.

> We'll pay for hosting

Will we? Most personal websites i know of, including my own, fit perfectly within the free tiers of Netlify/Vercel/Firebase/S3+CloudFront/GitHub Pages/etc.

The cost of a commenting system is not in hosting, it’s in moderation.

And that cost falls squarely on the site owner not the comment service. Moderation may be as expensive or as cheap as you make it.

Big Tech is spending a lot of money on it, thousands of people and jobs and algorithms.

If you ask me, it's a fools errand and I hope that they waste their money trying to build a clean Internet.

Reference: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....

I don’t know the rules for Disqus but I expect that they impose at least some limits to block bots and spam, which is almost impossible to achieve for a small site.

Check out akismet, it works for wordpress and is likely all you need to divide spam from ham during moderation.