In practice it effectively is. Without the Google, Facebook, and Twitters of the world pouring substantial resources into hosting and powering those platforms

In practice it effectively is. Without the Google, Facebook, and Twitters of the world pouring substantial resources into hosting and powering those platforms a decentralized approach needs to cover costs somehow. Of course they monetize the users and their content and make a pretty penny while doing so (except for Twitter). The centralization of these big tech companies also brings efficiency, optimization, and economies of scale to this infrastructure that decentralized blockchains inherently don’t have. There’s also the issue of much of the Web3 infrastructure being hosted on $BIGCLOUD because lots of data and usage at scale is really hard. Piñata just uses S3 and charges a hefty markup on top of it (as one example). S3 is $0.03/GB at the lowest usage. Piñata is always $0.15. I’m not saying the decentralized promise of Web3 is impossible. It’s just a bigger question of the vast majority of users who have already demonstrated they’re fine with being monetized by the big tech companies as long as their use is free/extremely low cost paying at least 5X of the fundamental underlying costs. That’s not even getting to content creators that have utilizes these free platforms to already generate significant income for themselves. The HN crowd has a much better understanding and resistance to big tech and what they do to offer free products that monetize the user. The vast majority of the billions of users on these platforms have demonstrated that they do not care.