Alternatives to advertising:
- Patronage. It's how the arts survived for the first 2-3000 years of civilization.
- Mechanical royalties / automated syndication. It's how musical performances are licensed currently.
- Live performance. Asses in seats.
- Mixed-model revenues. The Economist splits its revenue share roughly into thirds of subscriptions, ads, and bespoke services (the Economist Intelligence Unit).
- Memberships. Public broadcasting, Consumer Reports, and similar systems rely on contributions and pledges.
- Mandatory licensing -- the BBC television tax model. I'm not arguing that it's a free market system, however it's demonstrably worked and fairly well for nearly 85 years.
There are a lot of models. Mass-market advertising applied well to mass-media broadcasting. It's been heavily pursued online, though advertising rates (low), click-through metrics (phenomenally low), technical means of avoidance (readily available if not widely applied), audience dispersal (high) all suggest it's not exactly a resounding success.
I'm not so convinced HN is as anti-corporate as you claim, though I'd color myself that way. It's that there's a very high level of technical expertise -- far more than is necessary to be aware of and successfully deploy ad blocking. Without both factors, you'll find low utilization of same, even with a high anti-corporate bent -- which isn't all that rare, really.
I'll stand by my first point: the general public is fearful and highly ignorant of the technology they use in general. Show me some stats to the contrary and I might find this conversation more interesting.