This is shite.

I just went to look for a bass tab from bassmasta.com which has been the best site for bass tabs for a while only to find it's now part of songsterr which has some irritating midi type setup which if you want to do anything with you have to pay for. Ultimate guitar archive is even worse, you only get the first 30seconds or so of a song unless you subscribe.
This on top of the shutting down of so many good sites over the last few years.

If it wasn't for OLGA, tabcrawler and basstabarchive, I wouldn't be able to play bass.

I worry for young folk wanting to start playing and being faced with no help from the heads of the industry they're at the beginnings of joining.
Closing tab sites isn't fair.

Ultimate Guitar, heh blast from the past for me - used to post on there many years ago! I can hand on heart say I have never used tab, I learnt by ear - which is probably why I'm still semi-shite! I learnt to read music, don't know why I didn't learn tab.

Suppose the music industry will be looking to make money any way they can online, so any free resource of material they own the rights to will be targeted. Do any bands who own their music, like Clutch, post tabs?

themelvins.net has a whole bunch of tabs, and they're semi-official
http://www.themelvins.net/wiki/index.php?title=Category:Tablature

Train your ear and you'll never need tabs again. Most of them are wrong anyway.

This. Although certain parts I need help with, mostly because I suck but sometimes it's because I can't really hear what's going on with the rest of the song's instruments playing.

There is a site called playthisriff.com which has videos on how to play, a lot are done by the artists themselves, I don't know if they are still up but there was some Brant Bjork did and Jason Simon, not tab but cool. Also tabcrawler.com might be worth checking.

With regards to figuring it out by ear try to get the bass down then build on chords from that. I usually find if I'm struggling it's the best way.