and that's why trains work but you have to pay a higher price to use it, while youtube is shitty, and breaks often, but it's free to use.

It is about the trade offs - not the trade offs that someone talks about passively, but actual action based trade offs; ala voting with their feet.

Which proves something about ads: there's a law of conservation of ads. If you're not claiming the ad space, your upstream suppliers will.

This is false. Nothing is free.

We watch ads. We are tracked like animals. That time, attention and loss of privacy *is* payment. For this, it’s reasonable to expect a service that aspires to rise above shit-show.

If you can’t figure it out on your own. If you can’t think like an economist, then please ask your favorite LLM.

This isn’t Reddit.