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I think quality of the conversation will always trump "privacy, openness and ad-free".

We have to pay for quality. If we're not going to pay with dollar bills, we pay with privacy.

Until you are like in HK and need to organize yourselves for some reason.

> If we're not going to pay with dollar bills, we pay with privacy.

Paying with ads is also possible.

But if you pay with ads, don't you need to see a LOT of ads, unless your privacy is compromised and they use trackers about you to give you targeted (i.e. more lucrative) ads?

I'm not sure what it costs to have a service running and what non-tracking adds may yield nowadays.

So: not sure.

I don't see why topic-based ads based entirely on on-site participation would be a problem. No need for any user-hostile garbage, bucket your communities into topics, and let advertisers target the topics or the intersections between them. Ads are sold on-site, not via third party networks.

Reddit does this, but no idea how successful it is.

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