Whitelisting solves nothing. It's still a 'bad' userbase. It's been cultivated to be anti consumerist anti advertising etc.

Whitelisting on adblock will let through a tiny bit of CPM based revenue, but people won't click in the numbers that 'normal' people do.

How do you cultivate a user base in a particular direction, when all the content is submitted by the users?

The only way I can think of to cultivate an anti-ad userbase is to not have ads, but Reddit has had advertising for a long time. For a while it was even a bit obnoxious.

Right. You need to set the tone for a community while it is growing.