One thing that currently feels different on Nostr compared to other "classic" networks is that spam is not yet normalized as "ads". I still see some spam on Nostr (on the bottom of replies usually), but it's clear that it's spam. It's not somehow sneakily sorted on top, looking like a real content. It's very much clear that it's a spam or scam.

If you show me ads, then I think me (and the community) should directly benefit. I'm interested in seeing if the SN model works out (ads on SN put sats into daily rewards budget and that gets split to the most value providing users every day), or if there are different models that would make sense here?

Ads are just information paying for attention.

It's a lot like finance - an essential economic service perverted by middlemen.

I don't know how ads should ideally work, and I view ads on SN as an adjunct experiment, but I'm bullish on p2p ads as a concept.

(I also just spent the weekend chatting with someone considering whether to pursue a bitcoin ad startup.)

It seems that there are two phases to process of getting a product, when we idealize it for customer.

One is new product discovery. This is where you find out about a product you may want without you being aware that there's one. What if there's a honest service for the best product discovery? Impossible?

And second one is the informed decision. This is where you learn enough of truthful information or recommendation to make informed decision whether to get that product. What if there's a honest service/network for truthful information and recommendation? Impossible?

If we would have these two (maybe) impossible services, would there still be a space for ads? Or would the businesses rather spend the money on building a better product?

If you take the limit of product discovery/info services to infinity, I think you're right, there isn't a need for earnest ads.

Yeah, that's a good summarization. If we take the limit of product discovery/info services to infinity, then ads are there to only try bending the reality and hence ads become very undesirable.

Now the question is how far can we get with honest (decentralized? federated?...) product discovery/info and my guess is that we can get further than we are currently.

Further for sure. At what cost per unit of ideal product discovery/info idk, but the cost probably increases exponentially per unit ... and at least one cost is privacy.