Yes, I hosted a website for about two years. Paid for it from my own pocket. Had some fun, learned a few things.

There is this disgusting belief in modern society that everything one does needs to generate money, otherwise it's not worth doing. Were we always like this?

Yes.

This predates websites, it's called commerce.

Pick any medium, humans will always find a way to transact with one another, it's been like this for thousands of years.

I don't understand why you think websites and the internet should be exempt from this?

> > There is this disgusting belief in modern society that everything one does needs to generate money, otherwise it's not worth doing. Were we always like this?

Forget websites.

How are you going to pay the rent, or put food on the table for your children if you don't want to generate money?

Unless you're retired with savings (some on HN are), have an inheritance windfall or are living on government money, then you can do things that don't need an income.

Otherwise you need to generate an income.

Perhaps they have a point actually: if we assume that a significant proportion of society is retired with savings (and this is the case in the US - ~1% of population can afford a rich lifestyle on passive income alone, and ~5% can afford about a median lifestyle), then serving society may become a calling for those people - they need something to do after all - once everyone will understand that normal "jobs" became mostly harmful to society, or if not harmful, so poorly paid that anyone with even $2M in stocks will not be interested in doing them.

> There is this disgusting belief in modern society that everything one does needs to generate money, otherwise it's not worth doing. Were we always like this?

Most of the world has always been this way. The idea of sharing and exploring for the sake of it was a Christian ideal that rose and fell with their influence in the west.

Multiculturalism exploits generosity; competing interests replaced shared goals. If you don't profit from your efforts, someone else will.

It's not speculative: if you make free space available to campers, the postmodern entrepreneur will sell access to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36686672

My personal website has been up for over two and a half decades. I've paid for hosting and for the domain name. Never had an ad on the site.

So do you expect everyone else to not earn an income from their website if they so choose?

> Never had an ad on the site.

You know there are other ways of people making money without doing ads right?

  > So do you expect everyone else to not earn an income from their website if they so choose?

No. I expect the fact that a website _can_ be run without ads to become reasonably well known. Not that a website _must_ be run without ads.

> You know there are other ways of people making money without doing ads right?

Yes, of course. And as per the conversion, there was no need to mention that obvious fact.

For a website to stay online, it is not required that the website itself make money, let alone that it do so via ads. For instance if your website is directly selling an actual product, you can make money by selling that product. Or you can make money by having an actual job, and use that money to pay for the website.

And if the place you work at has a website and internet presence which they get traffic for and use for inbound customers?

If they can't pay you because they don't have customers, how will you (in a job) pay for the website to stay online without a job without using your savings?