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Tangentially, I think that the “excuse” for these platforms that they need to make money enabled a lot of the current dystopian level of ad tracking.

Network effects be damned, we should all be a little more willing to pay to be part of platforms hosting digital communities or at least contribute in some way to the infrastructure.

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And if we did, what would be the difference? Sure, there would be no ads on the platform (plenty of sponsored content, though), but there would still be an algorithm. And it would be minimally different to the one that exists today. The current ad driven model doesn't allow paying advertisers to drive the algorithm. Rather it lets you drive the algorithm by your revealed preferences and then allows advertisers to target you based on those preferences and insert their ads in the result, which is much more effective. But if we didn't have the ads, the algorithm remains. The question "what does this user want to see?" is equally as relevant to a company that wants to convince a user to keep paying for their subscription as it is to a company that uses it as an advertising vector.

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