> How is this supposed to work?
By paying, not with your data but with your money.
Why does Linux work if nobody pays for it? People like to work on it and it's a community project useful to everyone. Lots of site are run this way, but too many see that they could make a few pennies out of it and turn that way. Then it turns to a dependency, people start blocking ads, and oh my god the whole internet cannot be paid for, you argue.
I'd much rather pay for things that are expensive (large sites like HN and Reddit, streaming licenses like Spotify, bandwidth and storage of Youtube, etc.) if then they didn't try to invade my privacy. In fact, I do pay for Reddit and Spotify. Youtube won't stop invading my privacy because they're Google's and HN does not have a donation option.
I host websites myself and it costs me a little, but even HN-frontpage events are not expensive enough to warrant subjecting my visitors to modern ads (which means not only annoying ads, but sometimes malware, and always invasive tracking).
> 1. Why do you guys downvote civil, informative posts that just happen to be philosophically different than yours?
I suspect you can't point out which post you're talking about or you'd reveal your real account, so I don't know what you're talking about specifically. I'm going to wager it's because they think those arguments didn't further the discussion and are really just plain wrong. (That's what I think they think, not saying that I think so, because I still have no idea which post it is about.)