Comment by Workaccount2 4 days ago
One of the core problems of the internet is that the "everything-is-free-if-watch-ads-but-you-can-also-easily-block-them" paradigm of the last 25 years has created a generation of people with an innate entitlement to free services.
Asking these people to directly cover the cost of the services they use incurs a level of incredulity and anger on par with charging to breath.
The problem is that people like yourself don't even register on the radar.
Nebula for example is the choice answer to the enshitification of YouTube. Lots of the top creators push it to billions of viewers. Pretty much everyone who does the YouTube rounds knows about it.
Yet they only have ~750,000 subscriptions.
That is an awful conversion rate, and why these creators will be stuck making ad supported yt content for the foreseeable future. People overwhelming do not want to pay directly.
I think people like me do register on the radar, see platforms like substack, kagi, bandcamp or patreon to mention a few. Linux is more popular than ever and keeps slowly growing.
It won't happen overnight, but there are now viable businesses out there with non-ad business models. Yes they're not as large as Google, but I don't think they need to be either.
Like OP, I think now that we see enshittifcation happening all over the place, there is also a growing market of people who are willing to pay for something of high quality that won't be enshittified. Kagi is actually good example: who would've paid for a search engine 10 years ago?
Personally, I try more than ever to give my money to privately owned non-vc funded companies or open-source projects. I avoid big publicly traded tech companies as much as possible, because I've lived to see how modern business models + the constant need for growth plays out, and I'm done with it.