If you want the analogy to make sense, you have to specify a particular method of paying. At which point it becomes obvious that most places selling food let you use multiple alternatives. Websites usually don't give you a choice.

On the other hand, surprisingly few "ad-free" service tiers turn out to actually be ad-free, which tends to undermine the whole concept. It's extremely common to get various kinds of "special" promotions that don't go through the standard ad platform. Sites have been known to forget the premium option when A/B testing changes to ad placements. Multiple streaming services have ads on some shows even on their top "ad-free" tier (I think because the ad buy was with the original studio/network and is written into the show's distribution contract). Several marketing gurus have figured out ways to game social media networks to make "non-advertising" posts featuring their brands go viral (see e.g. the fad of "weird brand Twitter").

Price thing: no one can afford to pay "a latte per month" for every site they visit.

Trust thing: the site is likely to still spy on you even if you're a paid subscriber. Even if they drop ads they'll send your data to google or some other analytics provider, at the least. They'll "accidentaly reset" your email preferences. Plus other shenanigans *.

Infrequency thing: I won't subscribe to $SOME_SITE just because it's linked on HN a couple times per year.

* friend of mine said he's tempted to subscribe to the economist online. I pointed out that they need to call or talk to a rep over live chat to cancel. Friend stopped mentioning subscribing to the economist.

Yeah, I pay for Windows because that way, I can trust that Microsoft will treat me right, unlike Linux, which I'm sure is infested with ads.

Frustratingly, even when you pay handsomely for subscriptions to major news providers, they still show ads (and quite a lot of them). A few are willing to sell you an ad-free subscription if you can establish a connection to the EU, but those seem to be thin on the ground.

I really and truly do wish this wasn't true, but it is. Part of this is because we've built an expectation that the only thing one needs to pay for to use services connected on the Internet is access, and once access is paid for, the problem is solved.

But that's not the case. Products cost money, and we've established a pattern of free to play to freemium for much of the most popular services. This could change, but it would take the major players to flip the script, and they've invested so much into ad systems that they'd be hard pressed to abandon it.

Because they both involve non-consensually using your computer for something you didn't want it to do as a form of "payment" you didn't agree to? In fact my point is I didn't see why you would ever consider crypto mining to be murder in this analogy. Crypto mining only uses your computer to do some pure computations and send the other party the result. It does not exfiltrate your private information or stalk you. It does not facilitate scams. It is obviously vastly more ethical than drive-by adware, which uses your computing resources and does those other bad things, but for some reason you don't find people defending crypto miners very often, while you do find them defending ads (I suppose because they participate in adware/spyware delivery somehow, so they're not interested in examining their own actions).

How can you justify it being okay to send drive-by adware and spyware with a requested web page, but you believe it's not okay to use computation as a form of payment without consent?

Personally, I've only ever worked for companies that make money by having our customers pay us for the product or service that I work on, so I've never had to worry about that conflict of interest.

> Stop mooching off people's hard work by killing their only source of revenue, ad blockers are immoral

What hard work? Most of the time it's "content" written by minimum (African) wage "copywriters"*. We are drowned into a deluge of shit, so excuse us when we don't trust anyone.

Also, I believe you have no idea what the "cookie law" is about.

* soon to be replaced with "content" that is LLM generated.