It's obvious that ycombinator's business model is not based on Hacker News advertising - but hacker news is still used as platform for their portfolio companies and services. Hacker news is just a curated list, so calling it "free content" is a bit of a stretch, unless you're saying that the content provided are the comments of the user, but I'd argue that the website wouldn't be the same without the link to the content being commented on (which are in a big part, funded by ads). Y-Combinator is for profit by the way, and it invests in companies supported by advertising (e.g. Reddit).

> Funding only matters in a worldview where everything you do has to somehow turn a profit and grow to a gigantic scale to bring in even more profit.

Funding is not required only for growing into a gigantic scale. If you want to open a restaurant in your small town, you'll require some sort of funding. Even if you don't want to profit and just want to cover costs, you'll need a stream of money coming in from somewhere. I personally don't see anything wrong in people getting paid for their work - if you really want to create your own content and give it out for free, you can do so (a lot of people currently do just that).

> There was a time when people on the internet weren't looking at it like "how can I get rich from this".

I'm not sure exactly when that was. There's been people trying to get rich from the Internet for a long long time.

At the very least someone has to pay for the server and network infrastructure, maintenance and of course content creation. Some of that might be provided for by public funding while other aspects are covered by enthusiasts putting in their time.

Just because somebody else pays for it or somebody else does the work required it doesn't magically become free.