I think it's alright if we have to pay to use social platforms

i’ve personally hated ad-based business models for the longest time. they obscure the real value of what people are consuming. and now a whole generation has grown up to expect shit to be available for free - all while feeding the privacy eroding, big data machine. but i also have to concede that ads enable access to services for people with little to no spare income. without ads, some kid in rural india wouldn’t be able to learn engineering on youtube for “free”. alternatively, imagine having to pay up each time a software engineer needs to refer to some syntax or coding concept. even if the amount is small, paying for each search is out of question, and you can’t be subscribed to a 100 websites on the chance that one may have relevant resources for you. there are also handy apps that ease people’s lives everyday, while showing them ads occasionally (and guzzling down tonnes of tracking data from their device). i’m just torn between what the right thing to. personally, i still detest freemium/ad-supported content. but i can’t unsee the support they can enable for the lower strata of society.

No one is going to leave Twitter, freemium model has always worked and will continue to work, both free loaders and paid subscribers will peacefully coexist