> We just need to come up with better ways of funding them that don’t involve building a massive survellaince apparatus. You're absolutely, completely, 100% r

> We just need to come up with better ways of funding them that don’t involve building a massive survellaince apparatus. You're absolutely, completely, 100% right. This is a critical need! Sad to say, I can think of several models that have been tried - donations, subscriptions, and merchandising come to mind. None require building a subscription apparatus! This makes them morally superior in very important ways, but all of those approaches come with distinct downsides. They all have distortionary effects on the user experience and condition the continued existence on the service on a handful of people. Perhaps we should stop and think carefully about why surveillence-fuelled ads are so popular an approach. It's a systems that lets one monetize lurkers who are otherwise minimally interactive. Which is most users. As a result, the income base is much broader and more predictable. We need better models. And we need to understand our models better.