How about a model like Wikipedia?

It’s free. If you find it useful and can afford it please donate. If not it’s still free.

Seems to work out excellent for them.

Wikipedia relies on a lot of free labor.

This can work for something like an encyclopedia or for moderating an online community.

It's not a silver bullet.

This argument just shows how blind people have become to the possibilities. It's not either/or. There should be at the very least an option to pay and not be tracked. Most services offer no such option.

why should there be an option? is there some kind of moral imperative?

At the market there is one way to buy, I don't get to ask for alternatives to paying upfront. This (for lack of a better term) entitlement really puzzles me. In the physical world, if I don't like the terms, I leave and don't do business. But on the internet, when people don't like the terms they flout the rules and consume anyway.

edit: I think it would be ideal to have multiple options, I would rather pay directly myself than paying by watching ads. I just have a problem with justifying refusing to pay in the way the business wants, yet still consuming their content.

The ones willing to pay are the ones the advertisers want to track, so that won't work.

If its vital enough that everyone must have access, then it should be considered a public utility like water, or something the government should subsidize like food stamps. I'd be happy for my tax dollars to go towards a well-moderated social media platform that everyone can access and by design doesn't do shit like optimize "engagement" or whatever monetizing nonsense current platforms do to try and make a buck.

If you wan't social support nets, get your government to create social support nets. Using "but think of the poor" as an excuse for an industry that is designed to get you to part with as much of your money as they can is absurd.

If its an important service it could be subsidized. You can get past newspaper paywalls with a library card in most cases, people are just lazy and prefer to spend the 20 seconds it takes writing a comment complaining about a paywall rather than the two minutes it takes to find out your library covers these newspapers.

And we wonder why people seem more uninformed than ever...

> You see it today with newspaper paywalls and the like.

Curious example, since this was the case for most of the history of journalism.

Not entirely, historically newspapers had both ads and a sale price. That price was subsidised by ads.

But you’re right that it’s not so clear. Maybe a more straightforward example is broadcast TV: ABC, NBC and the like. Free at delivery, paid for by ads.

Classifieds were a huge source of income as well.

Yes, that's what I meant. Even though it was subsidized by ads, you still needed to pay for it.