Yea that's how business works - you take parts, add value, and produce new parts. In this case a curated set of links with discussion. The costs for you the user are so low (ad supported) because users do most of the work. You'd have to pay a monthly fee if Reddit had to employee thousands of people to curate the links for you. And given you don't like paying money in the first place, there would be no Reddit.

The idea of having third parties only pay for bandwidth and not lost ad revenue is absurd. Some special class of users who are not paying their fair share which in turn means more ads for everyone else to make up for free loaders.