[fxtentacle]

I fully agree with you, that there is good content. But in my experience, the good content on HackerNews is freely accessible without ads or paywalls because the author has another job and is writing just to get his/her story out, and not for any financial reason.

I'm happy to read a programming story written by a professional full time programmer just for fun.

I'm not sure I would equally enjoy a programming story written by someone who cannot find a programming job to pay the bills.

In the beginning, the internet was only people sharing things just for fun in their free time, without any commercial intent. I would like to go back there as the base model of how content websites operate.