[ben_w]

That rips off the advertisers and/or leaves the poor poorer.

For any given ad supported service, one of two things must be true:

(1) the ad spend was more than or equal to the cost of the service for those users

(2) the ad spend was less than the cost of the service for those users

From fork (2), it follows that the service isn't sustainable anyway.

From fork (1), it follows that the buyers of the ad slots in turn only make a profit if those ads led to sales higher than the ad spend.

But for any given poor person, buying that which was advertised on the ad supported service necessarily means spending more than they would have on a non-ad-supported version of the same ad supported services.

[attila-lendvai]

or (3), the non-obvious, or non-advertised effects of the service may be valuable enough for powerful people to make the service "profitable" through artificial money flows (e.g. by paying for ads, endless investing, stock price manipulation, etc).

thinking of stuff like facebook here...

[ben_w]

Paying for ads like that is still a subset of fork (1). Even as propaganda, it has to somehow be "worth it" to spend the money.

Endless investing is, depending how you look at it, either not (just) ad supported and preceeds the premise, or it still is ad supported (and hence (1)) just with extra steps to badly hide who is doing it.

Hmm… I suppose the purchase of a vote in a democracy is something that a poor person might not otherwise be able to sell, and where "we advertised and convinced you" is (depending on campaign finance etc. rules) one of the legitimate ways to do it… but even then, for reasons too long to type on my phone, I'd say in this case it would still make the poor poorer.

[AxEy]

This assumes that poor people's attention is liquid and can readily be turned to cash whenever they please.

It doesn't matter how much you think my attention is "really worth". If I want the service now, have no cash, but can pay with my attention, I am strictly more enabled than if the service only accepts cash.

[ben_w]

I make no assumption there.

The fork between (1), (2) is how much cash their attention is actually turned into.

To put it another way: what's the attention of a poor person really worth, in dollars? Answer is always less than or equal to the amount they can spend.

[AxEy]

The comment you were responding to said that the free tiers were a boon for the poor and you responded that they (under the fork of interest) "left poor people poorer".

I mean I supposed every transaction leaves someone poorer of something and richer in something else. I'm not sure of the point though.

I concede that if the ad companies are willing to forgo collecting X dollars in exchange for showing you an ad then it must be worth >=X dollars to the ad company for the person to see the ad.

But it remains true that the poor person has no way to convert their attention directly into X dollars, and all that taking away the free tier does is make it so that someone who would have made a trade (of their attention for a service) cannot do so.