How were websites funded when the WWW was first created? Tax dollars, hobby/altruism, university dues, etc.

Don't want to spend an arm and a leg for bandwidth? Don't include megabutts of JS, CSS, images, etc. Optimize and respect your users/guests.

That only worked because the traffic to bandwidth cost ratio was small.

Youtube would cost any normal company untold millions per month just in bandwidth costs alone, and there's actually so much more to it. I would bet money that even Discord's bandwidth bills are at least 1 million USD per month if not more.

>would you rather pay to access that content? how else could the site be funded?

I can't speak for GP, but don't care how a site is funded, unless it's my site.

If a particular site goes away, it's no skin off my nose.