>Well I personally owe an entire career to the fact I could learn to code for free thanks to add supported services.

In my experience the sites which you pay a small monthly fee ($5-10) to are far superior

Something worth remembering whenever these discussions come up, is that for a large number of people, including me at the time, that is too much money to spare.

Well, consider that in that case, the fact that advertising enabled you to view the site is a fluke that will probably be extinguished eventually.

If you have literally zero money, even to spend on activities with high expected future return, your value to an advertiser is zero, and eventually they'll figure out how to not waste resources on you.

The correct answer to poverty is not 'make the world a bit shittier for everyone and hope it balances out'.

(As an aside, I also used to have ~no money, and can't really say I required ad-based sites to learn. I just pirated it all, used sites without advertising, used IRC, etc. I think this idea that everything has to be ad-supported is quite a modern phenomenon.)

> (As an aside, I also used to have ~no money, and can't really say I required ad-based sites to learn. I just pirated it all, used sites without advertising, used IRC, etc. I think this idea that everything has to be ad-supported is quite a modern phenomenon.)

A lot of the best content on the Internet is hosted by its own creators, paid out of their own pocket, out of willingness to share the knowledge.