Here's a beautiful and informative website: https://bestmotherfucking.website/
According to Firefox's Network Monitor, that's 2.47kB of data transfer. It's static HTML, so server load is minimal. One small donation could cover the costs for years.
If something isn't working the way you want, that's a sign to do something else.
The web was specifically designed for that to not be the case. Despite all the garbage we've loaded on it since then, ultimately it's still an act of mere minutes for anyone with an internet connection to start a website and serve it to all comers.
Tools like IPFS and Bittorrent only enhance that ability. The future is rosy, and it does not need advertisers.
What they need is money to produce content worth reading.
People with something to say will find a way to say it, money or no.
The way this works for sports and music is you produce for free because you love it and are good at it, until you are scouted or discovered or get an agent, and ‘go pro’.
Used to work the same for writing. Can’t see why it shouldn’t just because a few written word performers prefer busking.
I think you believe we can get all our content from local, interested bloggers. We can't. There is no filtering and no curation. There are no stakes in telling the truth because no one has a business to defend. Pulling information together and filtering out the rubbish is long and arduous and it's work. That's what journalism actually entails, not the writing part, which is fairly trivial.
But yours seems to be a typical HN response. "People feel this is important to do without being paid, therefore we should not support them as a society". It is an attitude I cannot comprehend. Something is important to our civil society - why not make doing it a viable living?
I pay for the Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, National Geographic and others. I would pay more for them, sans adverts.
If you can't produce content that people want to pay for, what are you actually doing?
If you achieve this, the result will be that the only people who can publish on the net are those with deep pockets and other interests. They may be companies (who write content as marketing), plutocrats (who will publish pro-business propaganda) or the state.
This is where we are heading: where the average citizen learns about their country from a Facebook feed, written by the Koch brothers.
This is going to have incredibly harmful effects on our society, and - I will not mince words - it seems to me the blame will rest with _people like you_.
That means YOU will be responsible for fake news and newspapers competing with the worst of the internet. That YOU will be responsible for advertisement disguised as news. All because you were too outraged to accept ads and too apathetic to pay a few dollars for paper news.