I know this is gonna be unpopular take

but for modern social media to function, they need showing ads to pay creator

many people livelihood depends on it, creator make content in turn of revenue sharing that user get for free

I get what you're saying, and in the beginning days of the internet, I hoped that people would adopt a payment system where a user could distribute a pool of money to the pages that they visited, in order to pay for server uptime, content creation, etc.

Of course, companies took the easy way out. Just serve ads. Until that got absolutely obnoxious and downright dangerous, then users started blocking them enmass.

Well of course, we're now in a place where the internet is mostly paid for with ads, and the content creators that want to get paid up front (substack, WSJ, FT, etc) want crazy high amounts for subscription fees. I'm not a trader, so I do not get enough benefit to make it worth while to sub to those sites.

So I guess I'll keep blocking ads for my own security, and bypass paywalls with archiver sites. Shame. It could have been different, but this is the bed they made, and they can lay in it.

AFAIK creators these days earn via additional channels like merch, tiktok etc. Direct views of some videos aren't prime for quite some time.

People dont have issue with creators getting paid, they have issue with absolutely evil platforms that host that and scoop up most of the value between creators and consumers. Platforms that willingly promote ie racist content because it simply drives more views/clicks.