I'm okay with that. I can't help but think the internet was better when it was mostly unpaid hobbyists and personal blogs without commercial interests.

The problem is that people are using their ad budget to compete with free content, but the free content is still going to be there it will just appear higher up in the search results if various bad actors aren't paying for a bunch of SEO.

> but the free content is still going to be there

Debatable.

For tech content this might be true but for general news, investigative journalism, reporters, etc. that probably won't be the case as the activity itself implies fixed costs.

That's false. Perhaps the author would not have bothered to write the article without securing economic compensation of some form, but advertisement is not the only possibility.

That is incorrect. Most people don't pay for content.

You can see how well donation links work on content sites and open source projects for proof.

Most people do pay. E.g. Netflix or whatever.

I personally pay $50/month on Patreon to various makers.

> Most people do pay. E.g. Netflix or whatever.

That's for long form video content (series, movies, documentaries, etc.).

Text content is rarely something people pay for.

How many newspapers are you subscribed to?

> I personally pay $50/month on Patreon to various makers.

Sure, but look what the ratio of Patreon subscriber to viewers is for Twitch streams or Youtube content creators is.

I guarantee you no important information is going to go totally unreported anywhere, even if ads ceased to exist globally tomorrow.

On the other hand, a whole lot of recycled content mills where all the $0.05/paragraph contract writers are about to be replaced by GPT-4 probably would.