It turns out the popular alternative is "force you to sign up (with a phone number) from critical mass/FOMO, track the snot out of you then slide ads in later." Oh, and the stuff you want is siloed away until you join, and buried in a mountain of rambling and engagement optimization junk.

Note that I'm largely talking about Discord, which is unfortunately where many of my interests have been shunted off to. People talk about Facebook, Google and OpenAI eating the internet, but I feel like Discord is the quiet trojan horse.

The companies that keep these are ones that people in certain professions (like journalism and politics) have to use, so their corporate paymasters just pony up the subscription costs.

Reader mode on

That's just fine as far as the site is concerned.

They provide content that is paid for by ads. When you block the ads, you're using up bandwidth and not contributing to the site's revenue. They want you gone.