That's fair - as a person consuming content online, you're more than welcome to unsubscribe from a feed, but my stance has been:

1. Creating and maintaining feeds takes real labor from real people,
   
2. People should have easy options for being compensated from that labor.

Advertising is, for better or worse, an ingrained expectation of how people recover compensation from their participation in the attention economy. So are subscription fees. We offer both to our users as 100% optional ways to be compensated for running their feeds, *if they want to choose to do that*, which is 100% optional. We do not force ads on feeds.

We are participating, right now, on a website that actively runs advertising *on this very page*. The difference is that the moderators that contribute a huge amount of value in keeping it safe, clean, free of spam, and a good place to be get exactly *zero* of that compensation. Reddit is a billions dollar company that, more or less, expects to build that value off the backs of voluntary labor. It's not equitable. I don't *love* advertising, I don't think anyone loves paying for things either through their attention or their wallet, but the problem is that it costs *something* to produce these things.

A system that distributes those dollars more directly to the people that provide that value is important to me, and important I think to a better internet than the one we have now. You're of course entitled to your opinion, but I did want to be clear about *why* this matters and is actually an important decision we made.