I see it often, but it is honestly the most laughably selfish opinion to believe that one should be entitled to the internet as it exists today, but also not pay directly or indirectly to be able to use those services.
Which is true. If its not on the web, then I don't read it, and don't miss it - by and large.
A huge number of people seem to believe that 95% of the internet is of any value - yet the existence of HN itself shows that's not true. This whole site exists to turn "the internet" into a selection of high quality links, and even then the front page is maybe 20% interesting to me on a day by day basis.
So how much of the internet matters to me? 6 links out of 30, selected by a community which completely avoids all the "major" sites.
This is especially true if we want high quality content. So the dichotomy is only false if you assume people are willing to accept "stop consuming content" which, by and large, they aren't.
Seems to me that creators are getting a dreadful deal from the current set up and that FB etc are the ones gaining massively.
Clough42 for example is a software engineer, and makes metalworking & 3D-printing videos that I enjoy watching; he certainly gets ad money (O(100ks) subscribers) but I'd guess he spends more on equipment, tools, etc. (and would despite the income) - certainly if you counted lost earnings from 'he could be doing contract work instead' - because that's not the point, it's a hobby, and a secondary hobby is putting it on YouTube for me (and millions of others) to enjoy.
(I'm sort of hesitant to single someone out - especially someone who's probably on HN, heh - but I that's the impression I get anyway. If it's not totally true for him I'm sure it is for others.)
As for quality, it's all opinion, I guess, but the only form that seems to have gotten better recently is prestige television, but even there I'd say it so far peaked around 2010. Film and pop music peaked in the 60s and 70s. Instrumental music, literature, and painting peaked centuries ago. Artists have created perfectly good art for as long as humans have existed without the need to track their consumers private behavior to develop targeted ad profiles.
> That was fine for centuries...
I always assumed that this was an artifact of recording technology: if you can record a movie or music, then you can have a handful of actors and musicians service the entire world, but without that each city needs its local musicians and theater troupes. If that's correct then we've been in this state for maybe 1 century.
For writers though it's been centuries, since writing enabled distribution of content in many places.
I'm not sure how you mean this but what you say comes dangerously close to implying that people want ads. That may be true if you force them into a false dichotomy (pay or have ads).
I think it's more just that people don't want to pay. If it's on the web, they read it for free, period. If it's not on the web, then it isn't and they don't read it. If you look at it from this perspective, ads aren't even part of the discussion. I think people prefer the "someone pays for it" model to anything else.
The dichotomy is only real if you construct a hypothetical scenario about some ad-or-paywall site that absolutely must exist and that people absolutely want to read and for which no alternative can emerge if that site stops existing.