Huh, learning about this "Superwall" product constitutes as my horror-story-of-the-day. It's paywalling as a service, just what the industry needed. Thankfully it appears to be quarantined to iOS right now, but God does it feel like we're headed right back into Stallman's predictions about how SAASS will ruin the landscape of commercial technology.
These days, if you're developing something for profit it's pretty hard to see your software as ethical. You're either trying to empower your user or trying to monetize them, the two will always fight one another and snuff the other out unless you, the developer, take a stand.I fully understand the market for proprietary software, but trying to define some ethical middle ground is just blatant lip service, nothing else.
It's better than targetted ads built on intrusive tracking that also enables several other abusive business practices. It's not better than "good old fashioned ads". Heck I'd even be ok with targeted ads if it could be done without the rest of the "destroy civil society" that seems to come along for the ride.
Even if you solve the privacy problem, there's still a problem with advertising which is that it's inherently at odds with the user's interests.
An advertising-funded product will always prioritize engagement - they want you to "engage" with the product even if it means degrading the experience intentionally such as making a process manual or take more steps than necessary (so that you are exposed to more ads). The "destroy civil society" problem you mention is a direct consequence of the pursuit of engagement.
In contrast, with a paid product, the company's interests are directly aligned with yours and they have no incentive to intentionally degrade the experience or get in your way any more than necessary. They don't care about how much you "engage" with the product as long as the bill gets paid (if anything, the less you engage the better as it uses less server resources).
Paid products can still do all the same datamining that advertisers do, and there are markets for buying/selling that info (eg. Palantir). The truth is that all forms of monetization are inherently at-odds with the user's interests. Paying for an app doesn't magically make this friction go away, and it certainly doesn't reduce the incentive for developers to abuse your trust.
> there are markets for buying/selling that info (eg. Palantir)
A major reason for these markets is that the information can be used for advertising or marketing targeting. In a world where the majority of products/services are paid and the amount of advertising is significantly reduced there will be much less demand for this information, leading to lower prices and even lower payoff from selling this information, not to mention potential legal risks (GDPR, CCPA, etc).
Palantir's biggest customers are government entities and market researchers, not advertisers. In a world where advertising has been significantly reduced, their products would become more valuable, since regular analytics would become inaccessible. Compared to the data these corporate aggregators collect, ad fingerprinting seems trivial.
The biggest crux of this, though, is the fact that both of these monetization schemes are destructive. Paying for software simply doesn't make sense in most cases, as there aren't that many people who are developing novel solutions these days. That's the exact reason why advertising is so popular: the market knows that relying on your conscious contribution is unsustainable, so why should you believe otherwise?
You're assuming it's either/or. When I worked at eHarmony we had a monitor that would scroll user feedback submitted online near the developer area. One of the most common complaints was about ads being shown to paid users.
I asked a PM about this and was told that the money they made was too much to turn down.
I don't disagree with that, but that's still not a reason to turn down paid options. With ads, you are guaranteed to get a bad experience. With paid product, there is potential for a bad experience, but at least it's not the guaranteed default.
Regulation around ads is the only definitive solution, but in the meantime if there's a business model that's non-toxic I'm not going to hate on it even if technically someone could still misuse it.
