Then once you live on the ad-blocked net, it’s pretty much torture to go back. I swear I can feel my energy, attention, and time being wasted by ads; either the ads themselves or the need to constantly engage critical thinking resources to manage the misinformation.
Quite an important point not to miss:
The vast majority of advertising actually just funds the low-effort mass-generated clickbait farms of the "you won't believe this celebrity XYZ"-type and similar crap.
I don't have numbers but I would be surprised if actual quality[0] content producers took more than 5% of total Internet-wide advertising income.
So, in order to "support quality content producers" like everyone is always talking about, not only are we supposed to put up with all these shitty ugly dirty-needle-stabbing ads, but ALSO we're directly supporting and funding the clickbait linkfarming spam industry several times the amount of ad funding that ultimately end up with the "quality content producers".
The highest quality content usually has the least intrusive ads any way. I remember when we just hosted a bunch of banner links for local businesses that we personally contacted and asked if they wanted to advertise. They'd pay a monthly fee and that was it, no shady practices, no tracking and no 3rd parties. If that was too much work, or you couldn't get good deals, the alternative was putting up your content for free, for the love of it, for the fame, for shits'n'giggles, for whatever what drove your passion.
That was the Internet nearly two decades ago, and there honestly was no shortage of free, quality content. And webhosting costs were quite a bit higher back then.
[0] regardless how you would define "quality", let's agree that clickbait farms aren't it.
I have no once of guilt related to blocking ads, if you can't pay the upkeep of your website and you haven't found any meaningful way for user contributions then that's on you and if you still serve ads because that's the only sane solution for your monetary problem then you should expect some users to block those ads and conclude that both parties did what they thought was best given this horrible situation.
Affiliate links are great and more people should really consider going back to this model.
sites like 9gag, 4chan or Reddit, or other such sites is where net culture breed. these sites are not going to have the same feel if it had been subscription supported, as large swarves of users who have no money to contribute, but have content and creativity would've been locked out.
Fill up a Brave wallet and it'll pay out content creators. You won't have to deal with ads and people get paid.