I’m not even reading that article because, no. But I’m all for an award system here on lemmy. All money goes to the instance hoster and the user gets badges, maybe a highlighted name. The most gilded users get entered into a giveaway every month or so for something like a T-shirt.
That’s allows for the instances to sustain themselves and gives users more incentive to post, without stupid subscriptions and promoting content farming.
Are they stupid? In fairness, I don’t know how they’re making any money at all. I’ve never seen anyone interact with the discover feed and therefore see ads. There really isn’t a way to monetize Snapchat without killing it off.