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Selling ads per se is fine, but in Substack's case it would detract from their focus on helping writers be good enough to sell subscriptions. I think that is special. Helping writers be good enough to draw the attention of free users has affected the writing the users produce at other platforms/publications.

I actually believe Substack is sincere when they said this week that the free following product is in service of driving subscriptions, when if/when revenue from free users is introduced, that's going to change no matter how hard they try to protect the original mission.