I would rather pay people and websites for content. I already do this today for journalism orgs and a handful of high value substacks, I'm happy to pay for more. I'd pay for HN. Free does not scale (with the caveat being orgs like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and others who have an endowment behind them and can self fund alongside donations; this, of course, is a model others can adopt), people need to eat, pay for rent, etc, and ads are ineffective when everyone can block them.
Ads are a symptom of the problem that people want human generated content for free; they either do not value the content enough to pay for it, or cannot afford it. Ads do not solve for those problems.
Ads are a symptom of the problem that people want human generated content for free; they either do not value the content enough to pay for it, or cannot afford it. Ads do not solve for those problems.