I dunno. Lots of people contribute to the web without expectation of payment. Like you posting here. The urge to create and share is powerful.
Look at all the people editing wikipedia, answering questions on SO and various forums, and even making videos without any real expectation of payback.
Seems like the web would be just fine without the professional “content creator” class.
(I actually feel like “content creator” is dehumanizing pejorative now.)
How many of those people can contribute for free because they get paid by something funded by ads?
For example: I'm currently learning DaVinci Resolve. There's a lot of great videos, and they're all free. I expect a lot of these people got as good as they are working on at least a few advertising contracts, or on media that will run with ads interspersed.
While your point isn't exactly wrong I do think it's a bit of a oversimplification.
Most editing of Wikipedia is done for personal reasons, including commercial (you get paid to write on Wikipedia) and with SO its most likely because information is cheap.
In fact the points you raise is so trivial that we've had bots do it for us way before chatgpt.
Compare this to artists, programmers and designers who only release things for free under strict circumstances (hobby, social gain, licensing requirements, etc.).
I choose to post here for free. Others choose to publish their content and have advertisers show ads for which they get paid. That's their prerogative. You have the option of not consuming the content of those who want to get paid or pirate it.
> You have the option of not consuming the content of those who want to get paid
Not really. Suppose you go onto a platform like YouTube, where most people are not being paid and some are (through advertising). How would you choose to consume only the content of those not being paid? There's no way to do that except to avoid YouTube and all similar platforms entirely which is not a reasonable option for most people.
Or I can choose to block ads everywhere and if someone has a problem with that they can stop providing their content for free - there will always be other entertainment to fill my time. Even without the tracking, ads are psychological manipulation inteded to make me worse off. I have zero sympathy for anyone who engages in that.
