Pay attention to details, designs, avoid ads and make the relationship between viewers and your platform help them to enjoy browsing your site.
As for me, having one or two ads is fine. This forum also has those banner ads and I'm okay with that. Though I understand that ads from Google are sometimes way too much and intrude your privacy worse than you can imagine.
Bloggers or content platform might need revenue, and ads are a classic choice for that. If they ditch ads entirely, then they could use Patreon or something similar. Using a system like Publish0x is also good imo, as long as the user won't game it with bots to pump up their own articles.