I share that opinion, but sadly advertisers were completely spoiled, over the years of social media companies bowing down to them. Even if unethical ways of targeting ads were banned, I assume the websites would get paid less.
Now when the pockets of many investors also dried up and they won’t just infinitely pump billions of dollars into an empty promise of mysterious grand future returns (unless AI is involved), sites would have no options, other than squeeze that cash, out of their users.
I know community donations exist, but they’re a model unsustainable for bigger sites and less dedicated communities - furthermore the more sites start begging for donations, the less money there will be to split among them.
The only option that remains, is paid subscriptions and microtransactions, that are already way out of hand, on many sites and I can’t even imagine how hard those would be pushed, if their finances got worse.
