[acdha]

The reason you keep having to justify yourself is because you're making contradictory claims: ”I don't see any quality coming from any business that is ad-based” but you obviously feel Ars' content is interesting enough that you “will just adblock + readability the hell out of their articles”. Only one of those statements can actually be true unless you're highly motivated to read articles without any quality.

It's really quite simple: if you want ads to become less popular you have to pay to support the creators: stop reading Ars or pay $5/mo to never see ads again. I'm assuming that you have no intentions of ever actually paying because you closed with an unintentionally hilarious example of entitlement: “If they want to see my money, first they need to get rid of ads and commit to excellence, not the other way around”. Despite reading enough of their content that you want RSS feeds you're still forced to change the rules yet again so they're supposed to work for free until you decide they've reached the $5/month level of excellence?

[rglullis]

You are mostly right. I am freeloading on Ars. But I don't see how my subscribing to them would make them abandon the ad-based subsidized access. They would just keep both models. If they announced they were getting rid of the ad-based model and just stick with regular subscriptions, I would subscribe in a second.

I know that my proposition is not perfect, and if I got my way I would be forcing my will onto other people (the ones who would be okay with ads in exchange of free access) but it's the best that I can come up with.