this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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Showerthoughts
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Marketing ruins everything.
I think that's too generalized. Marketing finances the Internet just as it has always financed print media (including the good, even inversitgative journalism).
I would definitely prefer a world in which sources of content are often paid-only instead of ad-supported, but the main thing needed for such a world is a higher minimum wage so more people have disposable income to distribute to authors they appreciate.
This would mean that if someone posts a rage-bait article like "Is Former President OBAMA Stealing Opium Money OUT OF YOUR POCKET?" then maybe people will click it, but the author won't gain anything out of it.
The only way this would work is if you paid for a subscription to many news sources a la Netflix. No one will buy subscriptions to each individual author or publication. But of course Netflix now has ads too, so greed really has no bounds, especially once they've got you roped in.
Patreon has pretty much already taken that spot.
A bigger concern with that model is that then Netflix of news or whatever gets to choose what you see. We'd have the Netflix of news with their own baked-in bullshit leading the charge regardless of how shit it was. Esoteric sources would die and popularity would rule that space.
Yeah how about no? Knowledge should be free, I'm not gonna pay 5c every time I want to open Youtube or some shit. In a utopia you'd pay some small government tax that'd go towards keeping the web ad and paywall free, so the people get happy and the greedy corporate rats get their dirty money.
That assumes either all sites on the web deserve equal compensation for their acts, or some body can decide what the relative value of each is and compensate each creator accordingly. You’d go back to having click farms, but they’d claim the government owes them a billion dollars for their high traffic.
Even the government would usually prefer that citizen money go directly to the systems that they prefer to support, rather than go through taxes to a government program that sponsors them (that’s why you get tax deduction for transit usage and charities). That second route is just needlessly complex.
There’s also better models for payment than microcharges. No one wants to consciously spend 5 cents in an online action. YouTube could require users to be subscribers to view or upload certain forms of content, or each individual creator would integrate some form of Patreon setup. A really simple solution would be to divide someone’s monthly subscription fee based on who they watched most that month.
I think that's too generalized. Print and written media existed for literally thousands of years before marketing finance.
Touch some grass.
Uh, no? If by media you mean anything that could remotely considered for the masses then absolutely not. The printing press was so revolutionary because it allowed making multiple copies of written documents without doing them each manually. Reading and writing was so expensive and rare a hobby because the written word was expensive; why would you need to read more than the basic signs if chalk boards were your limit of writing?
"News" before then was word of mouth. Town criers and the like.
My neato.
Guy replies with a hyperbolic shitpost about capitalism.
OP replies sincerely.
I reply hyperbolically in turn.
You assume I'm serious, then assume media can only mean "the mass news media" while ignoring any subtler parallels about access to information and adoption. (e.g. Does reading and writing being expensive relate to the early internet where access and hosting were expensive? Does the evolution of the written word have parallels with the evolution of the internet?)
If I'm responding semi-seriously, I do want to note that it's only in the American school system where there's no writing until the west gets paper. Armies of scribes carved into stone, impressed into clay, and wrote onto vellum to blanket empires in written news.
Yes. This semi-happened elsewhere. But this isn't for the "people". These were for the rich and powerful and the government.
And I'm sorry if your shitpost wasn't understood. As has always been the case, text is not a great medium for conveying sarcasm. We did invent /s for that reason.
"No! There are absolutely no parallels between the written word and the development of the internet," you growl through gritted teeth. "And while the stone markers distributed with text in several languages including that of the common people and placed in gathering areas did provide news to the people, it only carried the news the royals wanted them to now about," you finish triumphantly, not realizing that proves the point being made.
What does touch some grass mean?
Also, what kind of print and media existed for thousands of years? I thought it was just religious scrolls and cave paintings
I'm talking about modern print media of course, cmon. Also Printing does not date back thousands of years - it was invented (in the west) by gutenberg in the 15th century. What are you saying?
Printing existed a long time before the printing press. But woodblock printing lacked responsive design so we're definitely being too generalized.