[benoau]

Absolute desperation for the illusion of engagement and retention. Otherwise, you'll almost definitely only get back there via an aggregator rarely if ever. The aggregators themselves, are almost down to just Google/Apple/Meta/Twitter, they don't care who they send the traffic to they just want a shitload of rent. They only care if you pay them to promote/boost/etc, and that's just extra rent for the aggregator to get around their shitty discovery and search, plus maybe 30% fee if you buy your boosted posts on your iPhone.

With that illusion of engagement and retention, they can convince someone to pay them to put ads and shit throughout and if they're lucky earn enough to keep playing.

[iwatog]

Do you think we will ever move into an ad free era?

[benoau]

Maybe, we're already centralizing everything around a handful of big companies - for most of them ads are like a fallback more so than a plan A. Many things that are ad-supported have subscription-supported competition. Some of the tech industry loves their fees on that just as much if not more than ads.