Steve

That assumes you were entitled to something that nobody owed you.

If the money was never yours, can you say it was stolen from you?

Being an idiot in a hurry, I saw the medication Warfarin

Look for Signage Displays. They're basically TVs with different software.

It sounds like you're thinking there is no way to compete with Reddit. If you charge, people will use Reddit. If you have ads, people will use Reddit. People are only here because there aren't ads and it's free?

If you charge, you also have to offer a better experience than the free options. There's no reason instances can't use ads for people unwilling or unable to pay. For me I'll gladly pay for an ad-free experience.

That's not really how it works. If it was made to work that way, it would still be a relatively small group donating their own compute resources to subsidize everyone else. Which is what we already have, and isn't very scalable.

The only real option is to charge people.
Hosting isn't free. It costs money to run a website. That money needs to come from somewhere. If it doesn't come from advertisers, it must come from users.

There could be a verity options for that. But I like the simple annual subscription. Each and every user pays. Spread out the cost as much as possible. It's only fair.

Of course if one truly can't afford it, paying for search can seem a luxury.

However I would argue as a counterpoint; If there's any online service one would consider paying for, it should be search. Search is most literally our "front page to the internet". It's our first stop in any quest for information. Even the founders of Google knew early on, that putting adds in search creates a perverse incentive against the best results, favoring instead worse results, so people perform more searches, creating more opportunities to show people adds.

$5 a month isn't much to know your query will give the results you want, instead of the results advertisers want.

Haven't been able to find a copy of Big Shark by Tommy Wiseau.

Do you mean Reddit the company, or the Reddit the community?

I think the answers are "No", and "A little. It often gets deleted when mentioned."

I am familiar, and I'm still wondering that.
Seemed kind of obviously inevitable to me

Part of me hates myself for asking this. You clearly put a lot of effort into this.

Why? There are at least a couple actual blogging options with ActivityPub support. Why try to force Lemmy into something it isn't.