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What a magical world you live in where everything is free and no one needs to be paid for their work. Ads have been abused by companies over the years but whitelisting sites that whose content and services you value and don't abuse you with those ads are the only reason they can afford to exist. Edit: I get it, you don't want ads. People have abused them over the years and that's bad. My only point is that whitelisti…
The good old "there can not be free-of-cost content unless money is involved" fallacy. I am a member of many communities whose hosting costs are paid by the communities, the administrative tasks are shared by members of the communities, I "consume" many sites which only exist because their authors want to express themselves, I use sites that exist because people feel the need to share their knowledge and collections…
It seems like you just cherry picked a few small sites and claim that if they can do it, everyone can.
Sure hosting costs are ridiculous cheap and now anyone can publish for next to nothing. But do you get all your content from your friends posts on Facebook? There's a reason why real original and valuable content requires dedicated staff to do it and that does cost money.
You don't look at movies and think "well that could just be done for free if they really cared about it" so why attribute that to good content that just happens to be in another medium?