A lot of top-quality dev blogs are written by people who have existing well-paying opportunities. A lot of these people aren’t making an income writing blogs, just sharing the lessons they’ve learned from their jobs. Dan Abramov’s blog is a good example.

That is a highly disaggregated long-tail group of content with lots of low-quality content mixed in. Not only that, there's still the opportunity cost for the writer, and secondary non-monetary benefits that "pay" for the effort, be but let's ignore all of that for now.

It isn't practical for consumers of content to try and find the quality content mixed among the mass of dross when content is spread out among individual creators. This gives rise to aggregators. And even aggregators of quality content cost money to run. Maybe you'd use HN as a counter example but HN isn't run out of the benevolence of ycombinator, there are secondary benefits that justify the costs.

So my comment shouldn't be taken as "there's no such thing as quality content without costs" and if I made it too easy to interpret that way instead of more charitably, that's my fault.

So let me amend it: You don't get concentrations of quality content without costs.

idk but that does seem like it comes from costs, just not from viewer funding.

"Costs" does not have to mean "advertising".

Here's some quality content: https://www.raptitude.com/

I've been following that blog for years, via RSS. Every article he writes, I read. He gives it away. You can support him by becoming a patron or signing up to courses, etc. he offers. No advertising, and very high quality.