Flutterby™! : Must everything be a profit center?

I saw yesterday, someone saying they were blocking/unfollowing/whatever Anil Dash because his web site did the whole wait a few seconds and then pop up the "subscribe to my email list!" thing, and today Anil Dash wrote:

At a certain point you’re asking everyone to take a vow of poverty, unsustainability, or irrelevance. By all means, hold people to an ethical standard, and then beyond that, get over your aesthetics.

and some content has moved domains and URLs over the years, but I'm at over 3 decades of publishing stuff on the web, and longer before that paying for a phone line so I could host a BBS, without pestering you for your email address or your "real name" or whatever, and I'm thinking about what differing notions of why we maintain online presences.