Memes

I hate ads as much as anyone, but my question still remains for anyone who demands on blocking all ads and refusing to pay for premium, how do you expect servers and creators to be paid?

I'm pretty sure it's 2023 and this has already been discussed and solved ad nauseam, so I'm also sure all I'm going to say here is just repeated from elsewhere, but:

First of all, "creators" (not artists! There's a semantic difference) are not going to get paid better just because you pay for YT Premium. Premium pays Youtube, not the creators pleading not to be demonetized. If you're asking how are creators going to be paid, the answer is simple: directly. If you set up a service without intermediaries, for example a direct wire transfer, or at least something close to it like a Patreon, you get all of the coins and people who want to pay you-but-not-Youtube (or whatever platform) face a better incentive.

Second, stuff like gift cards.

Third, and this is something I've never seen any naysayer deal with properly: the same methods that have existed before can still work now. I don't remember ever paying rent for Usenet, or IRC, or BBSes, yet those things were literally plentiful, if I so much as lifted a rock in a cropped 8-bit-color grayscale PNG, the tranparency layer had a link to a BBS. And part of the issue is that there's a "attention deficit oooh shiny syndrome" going on where instead of using vintage-timer, battle-tested, lightweight, low dependency, cheap payment, low maintenance protocols and services for ensuring persistence and continuation of communities, we are for some weird reason insisting that whatever community launches next is a Perfect Imitation fo Youtube, or else. Such is the case of Matrix: for all its promises, IRC and XMPP are much better battle-tested and for the monthly price (and monthly annoyance) of 1 Matrix server you can run about 25 XMPP servers, or likely over 300 IRC servers.

And the key here is that it's the devs who have to take the turn return towards simpler, better tech. Devs gotta lead by example. Users (masses of) are obviously not going to be the ones to do it.