It's interesting how much we lost with the end of the advertising model (though likely its death would arrive with agentic access anyway). An unsurprising reaction to that was the advent of the widespread paywall. And in a world where every paywalled article on social media, including HN, is on an archived paywall-bypass site there was going to be a natural cat-and-mouse game. The distributed payment model of online advertising was surprisingly effective. No single person was worth very much but the aggregate of attention had a probabilistic conversion that enabled a sufficient ecosystem of news.

Now most of those who spend money get access to relatively good news in comparison to those who don't. The interesting thing is that if you model the utility of a customer base as trifactorial (subscriptions, ad-supported, influence-ability) and you set ad-support to near zero you're left with this situation where those with no ability to pay are now overwhelmingly useful to the website provider only as an influenceable base.

"If you're not paying, you're not the customer, you're the product", we used to say[0]. It turns out that's true, but if you can't pay by looking at ads, you will pay by the actions you take when you believe what the actual customer wants you to believe.

0: Though sometimes you do pay and you're still "the product" haha!