What do you use for - search, emails, online shopping, news (you mentioned HN but links submitted on HN have ads on them, unless you read only the HN comments)

Search: Kagi

E-mail: Disroot (but with any provider that supports IMAP, you pretty much never have to visit their website)

Online shopping: while some of the sites may have ads, they could easily survive without ads because, well; they literally sell products

News: if HN stopped allowing links to websites with ads, I certainly wouldn't miss them

HN won't exist if there are no news sites and almost every site has ads on it.

Many of the best sites I've discovered through Hacker News are ad-free.

Mind sharing a few examples? Would be great to know a few ad-free sources.

Sorry, in my massive list of bookmarks, I have no way to tell how I found out about the sites.

I am not asking about how. I am just asking which ad-free news sites do you use.

I use a mailreader to read email. No ads unless someone is spamming me, but that's pretty rare these days. Online shops don't need ads because they already sell their own stuff. I have my own news subscription. Admittedly many shared news links do have ads. For search I use DuckDuckGo; they don't seem to have ads most of the time, but if they do, at least they don't track.

I'm not going out of my way to avoid sites that use ads, but I also don't feel obliged to enable their business model; that's their business, not mine. I care about controlling my own desktop.

Keep in mind that there is a lot of content out there that's funded by Patreon rather than ads. And I think the quality of Patreon-funded content is generally higher, because people consciously choose to support it, rather than it having to use clickbait and other dark patterns to lure your eyeballs in.