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.
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.
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.