You may have missed all the free forums on the Internet, financed by hobbyists or a few unobtrusive banner ads. It used to be the norm. Surely most of the development efforts of FB go into maximizing revenue through use(misuse?) of private data, but this is a "free service" nobody asked for.
Oh boy I don’t miss the flash animated pop up ads, but that has less to do with forums vs social media and more to do with how the tech has evolved.
That said fb and google ads are pretty unobtrusive because they exert so many restrictions on businesses. If you’ve ever tried to run ads you’d find user friendly restrictions like “no all caps text” or “limit to text in an image”.
That depends on how you count. "Unobtrusive", maybe, but those ads are intolerably intrusive, because of the tracking.
Between the two, I'd rather have those old "spank the monkey" banners any day of the week. But I also fondly remember a time before even those existed.
In many ways, advertising has really ruined vast swaths of the internet.
On the positive side, running your own website or a forum is now easier than ever. I think more people should do it.
No. Windows is not free. Perhaps your interpretation of "these free services" is a bit far from mine. The topic was FB and the services it offers, which, for the majority of users (sans advertisers) isn't overwhelmingly different from other free social networks, which aren't disappearing because they're not making billions in profits.