[mandmandam]

Pedantically, that's not how cost per user works. Whether you have a billion users or 3, $2.50 / user is $2.50 per user.

And that infrastructure costs the same whether you riddle the platform with advertising and influence, or leave it pristine. In fact, leaving it pristine costs far far less to society, all things considered.

Anyway, 'at scale', $2.5 bn is a drop in the ocean. There are thousands of people who could pay that all on their own. The global economy is 100 trillion dollars (as of 2021). And there's this thing called taxation, which sorts out public goods and services (such as communication) at scale.

[rerdavies]

I'm not sure there are a thousand people on the planet who would be willing to pay $2.5B a year!