Because you get the value of the content created by other users. You are absolutely free to not contribute anything or even visit if you don't get any value from it, but someone is providing the service in the first place and there is nothing wrong with monetizing that service with advertising.
> nothing wrong with monetizing that service with advertising
True, except for the various ways that advertising is typically unethical in manipulative design, the unjust and problematic imbalance of power between platform owners and the communities who use the platforms, the fact that ads are usually tied to privacy-invading tracking… besides those sorts of things, nothing's wrong.
> You are absolutely free to not contribute anything or even visit
This rhetoric needs to die. You are free to not go to the grocery store and buy food, unless of course you want food besides that you can grow on your own as a subsistence farmer. I suppose the fact that grocers operate at scale with very organized corporate models in order to consolidate their economic power while consumers are divided into being individual shoppers is totally irrelevant to the market factors here?
If the supply side were divided into individual programmers etc. while consumers were all organized into powerful consumers' unions with near-monopsony, it would then be equally ridiculous and insulting to say "hey, you individual programmer — if you don't want to make the specific product the consumers' union wants to use, you don't have to; you are free to choose what you make".
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