The early internet also couldn’t provide most of the larger sites and platforms we now use. As it grew, it had to monetize in order to actually operate. If you want something outside the scope of a passion project, you need funding outside the scope of a passion project. The early internet did so well with people who actually cared because they didn’t have to operate platforms that couldn’t just care. They were operating things like personal sites and chatrooms, not social networks, document editors, or newsrooms.

Federated servers with donation-based models can function as of now, but you’d have a hard time covering hosting costs if every normal social media user began using federated platforms. There’s simply too many of them.

I’m not saying ads improve content, I’m not saying they’re the best model, and if you refuse to accept ads anywhere, that’s fine, but sites simply can’t all provide services for free, and if we want sites with the same functionality we have today, they need to monetize somehow.

Donations are definitely an option (I mean, hey, look at Wikipedia) but it isn’t necessarily viable for every online venture. For a lot of platforms, monetization must be compelled in some way, whether it’s by pushing ads, or paywalling with a subscription. The best option a platform can offer if it’s not capable of just running off donations alone is to let users choose the monetization they prefer to deal with.

True, but that’s a matter of technical implementation that I believe should be changed along with any proposed change to monetization models like I’d previously mentioned.

For instance, the site should delay ad loading until you pick “yes, I want to see ads,” or if you pick “I have a subscription” and sign in, it shouldn’t load them at all.

This isn’t impossible to do, it’s just something they haven’t made as an easy implementation yet, since things like Google’s ad services auto-load when a page is loaded, since no site really has a mechanism to manually enable or disable the core requests to Google based on user input.

It’s not violating your privacy when you agree to let them access all your data in the EULA. That’s why they exist.

Edit: I’m not saying it’s a good thing, that’s just how it works.

This isn’t really much of an issue, practically speaking. The likelihood of someone buying a subscription is different than buying a product from an ad.

For instance, while I’m highly likely to pay for a subscription to a streaming service that lets me watch videos from creators (in my case, Nebula) I’m not likely to buy any products from a sponsorship or YouTube ad. (and haven’t, thus far)

My likelihood of paying for a product in an ad is entirely separate from paying for the service those ads are on, and this is commonly true for many people.

If there’s an independent news outlet I want to support, I’m going to feel more inclined to pay them than I am to buy a product in an ad, just because each carries different incentives for me. I want to support the news outlet, I don’t want to buy a product somewhere else.

This is anecdotal, and I understand that, but as someone else had also mentioned before, even companies like Netflix are promoting their revenue from the ad tier, and having both is a good mechanism to keep the business afloat and allow it to acquire customers who don’t want to spend too much.

Where have you heard about that?

I can think of a counter example in how Netflix is boasting about the revenue of its cheaper ad tier.