> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".

There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads.

> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free

Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.

This vision is ripe for the picking:

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".

Or in the case of X, how about just let me browse without creating an account? Likewise with meta/FB, IG, etc. The reality is businesses and other services post here, share status updates, etc. often before their main pages. I'd like to read those, and yet I have no desire to actually post or interact with any of the content, just read it. I should not need an account for that.

> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads

I don't think we always need to broaden this out to industry wide levels. We can talk about things specifically. In this case, X/Twitter has put a login wall in front of posts to boost signups. It never used to. That's a meaningful difference that people seek alternatives to.

> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".

I feel like way too many people forget that there was a great middle ground for the longest time, in the form of Google AdWords. Text only, no animations, flash, iframes serving malware, or any of the other bullshit that had already taken over banner ad networks like Doubleclick at the time. I recall at the time one of the early adblock plugins even had the ability to allowlist AdWords while still blocking the shitware providers with the intent of encouraging the use of "good" ad networks instead of the bad ones.

It's a perfectly sustainable business model, it just requires people who actually care about not being annoying more than they care about maximizing profits, and at some point Google lost those people.

That's pretty much the general problem with our society as a whole, when given the choice between "profitable and sustainable" or "profitable and high quality" versus "more profitable now but will cause problems in a few years" the incentives of capitalism are all in favor of getting all the profits now and getting out before the consequences catch up.

Your comment seems to implicitly assume that X has some ethical claim to the content they're monetizing, when in fact they're trying to monetize _others'_ content.