Then the people who have not viewed an ad or paid a subscription in 20 years complain that the internet sucks and we need to go back to IRC and chan boards. As if ideologically non-paying customers have a voice worth listening to.
They buy servers to self-host services, extra hardware to store data locally and domain names to let others find them. Those who cannot afford it sometimes join niche communities like the Tildeverse as an outlet for the interest.
In my experience it's largely the 'just not interested' camp who always go for the free webmail and whatever free messaging service comes with their phone.
Do people who ideologically refuse to spend money on meat-foods have nothing worth listening to about animal welfare? Who don't spend money on airline flights have nothing worth listening to about climate change? Who avoid companies which use slave labour in their supply chains have nothing worth listening to about human rights?
'Money talks' but that doesn't automatically mean money has anything worth listening to; markets are manipulated by money as well as using it for signalling, and as a goal-seeking mechanism they are prone to local maxima like other things are.
So to follow your analogy, they eat meat by stealing it, and feel like they are sending a message about animal welfare.
You are arguing on the premise that ads would somehow be a fair exchange. That is simply the opposite of the truth. Ads are parasitic. Services with ads are almost always worse than services without, not just by having ads but also in every other way. Ads do not incentive quality, they incentive treating your users as prey and feeding them SEO slop.
I want to compensate people for actual beneficial work they do. But with most for profit internet services that is simply not possible. If you give them a finger they will take your whole arm. For exampme I want to buy good movies. But I simply cannot. All I can "buy" is a pinky promise from them to let me watch a movie under their conditions which they can change at any time under their sole discretion and they can just revoke that possibility for me completely at any time. Would I pay for Netflix they would only give me 720p no matter how much money I give them, because I have to much control over my own hardware for them.
There are exceptions to this that I happily pay for, but those are all niche services that cater to the small group of people like me.
But they went bankrupt in 2017.
Why? Because people don't want to view ads and they don't want to pay a subscription. Vid.me was unable to monetize and collapsed.
Nebula is a more recent example. Creators falling over themselves to promote it, yet conversation rates are still <1%.
It's not anti-competitive practices killing these companies. It's childish entitled users who get offended when asked to compensate.
But I suppose expecting ad-free video streaming 'just because I paid for it' is also entitled and childish, because to people who use those things as putdowns, everything other people want, is. It's like "everything I don't like is woke" in that sense.
The ad-free version is available if you cover the cost of lost ad revenue.
Just because you pay doesn't mean there will be no ads. And just because there are ads doesn't mean there is an ad free service available.
This is how smart TVs can be bought for $300. It's a $600 TV but you pay for half of it in smart TV ads.
Apparently so. But that isn't what I signed up for. That isn't the product I started out paying for. And that isn't the product I agreed to switch to, except by some weasel words on their part.
Your original argument is that people don't pay for things because people are crybabies. My counter argument is that people do and did pay for things and companies abused that, and now people are "once bitten, twice shy" not "entitled". People paid for NetFlix and then when that became a success, content companies pulled their content and made their own streaming services. People paid for YouTube Premium to avoid ads and then YouTube showed 'sponsorships' which are ads in all but name.
https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/18ll7y6/i_have_you...
Also there isn't a way for people to pay their share of server cost for services like that. For your average non-video communication service your options are paying 0x or paying 50x.
No, they're not native to the protocol, nor are they required. However it's an open protocol. You are free to pick from a number of solutions that compose that goal.
Commercial IRC services? IRC Cloud comes to mind as one I've seen others use. Couldn't tell you how much it costs, how good it is, or if it leaks data.
And some networks provide bouncers so they basically do have that. And maybe some IRCv3 networks, I haven't looked into that much lately.