6 ms·

Funding the content suffers from a tragedy of the commons problem.

by jules 11y ago

VLM 11y ago
Something rarely discussed is how the cost of publishing the content is imploding. A generation ago it took a real company with full time employees to run Slashdot. In 2014 it took some volunteers and some linode instances to run SoylentNews using slashcode. In another decade you'll have people running things like /. and HN on the equivalent of a raspberry pi drawing 5 watts. A generation ago some cool sites started as an old desktop underneath some desk, then they scaled to internet size which meant a mid size corporation. Well, for technological reasons we're scaling it back down to some legendary sites will once again run on a desktop underneath someone's desk, its just that desktop will run internet scale not mere thousands of users. I'm not sure that society gets much value from journalists. Take corporate press release, lightly wrap in trendy breezy cliches and clickbait headline like 1000 of your closest competitors but supposedly your re-skin is better than theirs, and spam the link everywhere. When that industry is gone, I won't miss it. Remember when the blue collars were losing their jobs and the journalists were all "ha ha not my problem go back to school"? What comes around goes around, and after the journos lose their jobs they can go back to beautician school or air conditioning repairman or whatever, "ha ha not my problem go back to school"
- zzalpha 11y ago
  Something rarely discussed is how the cost of publishing the content is imploding. You are aware that content generation isn't, in fact, a technological problem, right? You still need folks to write the copy, edit, research and fact check, moderate discussion forums, etc. Yes, the cost of the actual physical act of publishing copy has gotten cheaper. But high quality journalism costs money. That's unavoidable. I'm not sure that society gets much value from journalists. Take corporate press release, lightly wrap in trendy breezy cliches and clickbait headline like 1000 of your closest competitors but supposedly your re-skin is better than theirs, and spam the link everywhere. I hate to break it to you, but: this was caused by the internet. Two major effects are at play. First, yup, it's a lot cheaper to publish complete drek, hence the Gawkers of the world. This has caused those organizations that actually invested in content generation to have to cut costs (ask any news agency in the world... the investigative journalist is a dying breed, to everyone's detriment). The result is lower and lower quality journalism as investigation, fact checking, and so forth, is thrown out the window. This is exactly like folks who would complain about the incompetence of government while trying to financially strangle it. And then, when that underfunded government isn't able to react to some disaster or adequately execute some social program, they use that as further evidence that government must be slashed ("look, government is so competent, yuk yuk yuk!"), while conveniently downplaying the fact that they caused the problem in the first place. Quality journalism is dying because no one will pay for content. And no one will pay for content because of the perceived low quality of journalism. Repeat ad nauseum.
  - VLM 11y ago
    I don't disagree with anything you write in detail, in fact I think we agree that due to a massive mismatch in supply and demand, until about 99% of existing journalism is culled, nobody is going to make any money in journalism. Maybe a good analogy is the village blacksmith is hurt and angry that he hung up advertisements on his shop wall, but nobody looks at them, and they're all going to be really sorry when there's nowhere left to put new horseshoes on because posting the spam was the only thing keeping the lights on in his shop. Meanwhile the general population drives by his shop in their cars not looking at his ads, and doesn't really care about horseshoes anyway beyond a general knowledge that everyone knows that everyone knows that horseshoes are really important culturally and a vital part of life in and of themselves, although individually no one actually likes it and no one is willing to pay for it. And my point is something like if you "need" something horseshoe shaped for crafty project or whatever, now a days you download a .scad from thingiverse, run it thru openscad, run the .stl thru curaengine to get a .gcode, then feed the .gcode to octopi on your printer and pick up your shoe in a couple hours at a cost of about fifty cents of filament. I mean, sure, building a village size blacksmith shop to get my horseshoe would be difficult and expensive, but its unnecessary and practically no one wants horseshoes, so I'm not seeing much of a problem.
    - zzalpha 11y ago
      And my point is something like if you "need" something horseshoe shaped for crafty project or whatever, now a days you download a .scad from thingiverse, run it thru openscad, run the .stl thru curaengine to get a .gcode, then feed the .gcode to octopi on your printer and pick up your shoe in a couple hours at a cost of about fifty cents of filament. You can't possibly be equating the manufacture of a simple physical metal object, something easily automated, and arguably of little valuable in a modern setting, with the creation of high quality, researched journalism, intended to inform the public. Can you? I mean, if you think that metaphor is at all appropriate, you've completely missed the point. Of both my own post, and of journalism in general.
      - saint_fiasco 11y ago
- paulmd 11y ago
  There's value to having someone with a deep understanding of a topic who can follow leads and investigate, construct a narrative out of disparate facts, and then deliver it compellingly. I guess it doesn't have to be a journalist, but you will need those same traits and I don't think that's a particularly common combination without specific cultivation. Clickbait and press releases obviously don't deliver that either, of course. The hardware to run a site has become much cheaper, but at the end of the day it still takes a lot of hours to produce content and cultivate a community. There's a huge amount of business roles and work that you're glossing over there - from admin to overseeing content production to developer. Peer-moderator type systems like Reddit have lots of issues - even at the best of times they have a bandwagon effect that shouts down statements that are unpopular with the masses, and at worst they are very susceptible to sentiment manipulation like voter rings. I don't doubt there are "viral" marketers that provide social-media promotion services. I'd also point out that looking at specific examples can be deceptive. Slashdot is late in its life cycle and the community has clearly decayed from its glory days. Digg probably doesn't need as many servers now either. But you'll never run a top-10 website on a Raspberry Pi - or any site whose performance you care about, for that matter.

Funding the content suffers from a tragedy of the commons problem.

by jules 11y ago

Funding the content suffers from a tragedy of the commons problem.

VLM 11y ago

Something rarely discussed is how the cost of publishing the content is imploding. A generation ago it took a real company with full time employees to run Slashdot. In 2014 it took some volunteers and some linode instances to run SoylentNews using slashcode. In another decade you'll have people running things like /. and HN on the equivalent of a raspberry pi drawing 5 watts. A generation ago some cool sites started as an old desktop underneath some desk, then they scaled to internet size which meant a mid size corporation. Well, for technological reasons we're scaling it back down to some legendary sites will once again run on a desktop underneath someone's desk, its just that desktop will run internet scale not mere thousands of users. I'm not sure that society gets much value from journalists. Take corporate press release, lightly wrap in trendy breezy cliches and clickbait headline like 1000 of your closest competitors but supposedly your re-skin is better than theirs, and spam the link everywhere. When that industry is gone, I won't miss it. Remember when the blue collars were losing their jobs and the journalists were all "ha ha not my problem go back to school"? What comes around goes around, and after the journos lose their jobs they can go back to beautician school or air conditioning repairman or whatever, "ha ha not my problem go back to school"

zzalpha 11y ago
Something rarely discussed is how the cost of publishing the content is imploding. You are aware that content generation isn't, in fact, a technological problem, right? You still need folks to write the copy, edit, research and fact check, moderate discussion forums, etc. Yes, the cost of the actual physical act of publishing copy has gotten cheaper. But high quality journalism costs money. That's unavoidable. I'm not sure that society gets much value from journalists. Take corporate press release, lightly wrap in trendy breezy cliches and clickbait headline like 1000 of your closest competitors but supposedly your re-skin is better than theirs, and spam the link everywhere. I hate to break it to you, but: this was caused by the internet. Two major effects are at play. First, yup, it's a lot cheaper to publish complete drek, hence the Gawkers of the world. This has caused those organizations that actually invested in content generation to have to cut costs (ask any news agency in the world... the investigative journalist is a dying breed, to everyone's detriment). The result is lower and lower quality journalism as investigation, fact checking, and so forth, is thrown out the window. This is exactly like folks who would complain about the incompetence of government while trying to financially strangle it. And then, when that underfunded government isn't able to react to some disaster or adequately execute some social program, they use that as further evidence that government must be slashed ("look, government is so competent, yuk yuk yuk!"), while conveniently downplaying the fact that they caused the problem in the first place. Quality journalism is dying because no one will pay for content. And no one will pay for content because of the perceived low quality of journalism. Repeat ad nauseum.
- VLM 11y ago
  I don't disagree with anything you write in detail, in fact I think we agree that due to a massive mismatch in supply and demand, until about 99% of existing journalism is culled, nobody is going to make any money in journalism. Maybe a good analogy is the village blacksmith is hurt and angry that he hung up advertisements on his shop wall, but nobody looks at them, and they're all going to be really sorry when there's nowhere left to put new horseshoes on because posting the spam was the only thing keeping the lights on in his shop. Meanwhile the general population drives by his shop in their cars not looking at his ads, and doesn't really care about horseshoes anyway beyond a general knowledge that everyone knows that everyone knows that horseshoes are really important culturally and a vital part of life in and of themselves, although individually no one actually likes it and no one is willing to pay for it. And my point is something like if you "need" something horseshoe shaped for crafty project or whatever, now a days you download a .scad from thingiverse, run it thru openscad, run the .stl thru curaengine to get a .gcode, then feed the .gcode to octopi on your printer and pick up your shoe in a couple hours at a cost of about fifty cents of filament. I mean, sure, building a village size blacksmith shop to get my horseshoe would be difficult and expensive, but its unnecessary and practically no one wants horseshoes, so I'm not seeing much of a problem.
  - zzalpha 11y ago
    And my point is something like if you "need" something horseshoe shaped for crafty project or whatever, now a days you download a .scad from thingiverse, run it thru openscad, run the .stl thru curaengine to get a .gcode, then feed the .gcode to octopi on your printer and pick up your shoe in a couple hours at a cost of about fifty cents of filament. You can't possibly be equating the manufacture of a simple physical metal object, something easily automated, and arguably of little valuable in a modern setting, with the creation of high quality, researched journalism, intended to inform the public. Can you? I mean, if you think that metaphor is at all appropriate, you've completely missed the point. Of both my own post, and of journalism in general.
    - saint_fiasco 11y ago
paulmd 11y ago
There's value to having someone with a deep understanding of a topic who can follow leads and investigate, construct a narrative out of disparate facts, and then deliver it compellingly. I guess it doesn't have to be a journalist, but you will need those same traits and I don't think that's a particularly common combination without specific cultivation. Clickbait and press releases obviously don't deliver that either, of course. The hardware to run a site has become much cheaper, but at the end of the day it still takes a lot of hours to produce content and cultivate a community. There's a huge amount of business roles and work that you're glossing over there - from admin to overseeing content production to developer. Peer-moderator type systems like Reddit have lots of issues - even at the best of times they have a bandwagon effect that shouts down statements that are unpopular with the masses, and at worst they are very susceptible to sentiment manipulation like voter rings. I don't doubt there are "viral" marketers that provide social-media promotion services. I'd also point out that looking at specific examples can be deceptive. Slashdot is late in its life cycle and the community has clearly decayed from its glory days. Digg probably doesn't need as many servers now either. But you'll never run a top-10 website on a Raspberry Pi - or any site whose performance you care about, for that matter.