A bit over a year ago, I tried writing on Medium, and what I found was no, not really anyway. Medium was putting the soft paywall on all of my posts, without me asking or benefiting from it other than hosting, though I could choose to make them hard paywalled. It was my impression at the time that they would only let you unpaywall your articles on there if you paid them that ransom, instead of every reader (by being a member). You could argue that the authors choose to post there when there are alternatives anyway, so it’s still on the authors (and I do).

A game where using the in-build chat is a bannable offense.

When I worked delivery, at multiple places, we did in fact not see a dime of this fee. Got chewed out by customers a couple of times over it though.

I agree with most of that, but I feel like we weren’t using the same Internet 15 years ago. There were still ample popups and popunders, many of which you couldn’t easily close (more than a few did the funny ‘you are an idiot’ trick of just open windows faster than you can close them to me). They were loud, both visually but also they would actually play sound in non-video pages (sometimes multiple at once). Most of them were either disgust or porn based (or the really funny meme of both at the same time). And there were so. Many. Viruses. I feel like advertisers have never been particularly respectful of the end user, and the main difference is that now they’re actively spying, where they maybe weren’t 20 years ago.

Most modern devices can manage the battery for you pretty well, helping with any harm it might do. But even then, it’s less bad for the battery than deep discharges and recharges (where the battery does get low). It’s honestly probably fine.