Otherwise why would businesses pay to host interesting content for free?

See, I think that's the problem.

Wikipedia is one of the all-time great projects on the internet, and it keeps chugging along all without forcing miserable ads on its users or charging them a subscription fee or selling their data to the highest bidder.

And their donation drives are perfectly fine, and I'm perfectly willing to give them some money every now and then as long as they're asking for what is needed to keep the site up and running.

Maybe not everything should be run as a for-profit business, with an overriding goal of monetizing clicks and maximizing profits?

Wikipedia and Archives Of Our Own have entered the chat

You know before websites became the norm to access informations, the main way to follow topics of interest was both newspapers and publications, and those required subscription or a price anyway. Since i did not grow up with the internet all the time, i used offline means to get informations, and i am fine with it. I never needed reddit as a primary source of informations, i can cut down my usage of it by 100%. If we want quality we still need to pay for it, with few exceptions most free sites just exist for ads.