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I would assume not everybody who is now in the click bait "journalism" and blog spam business could actually be a journalist. So if those would simply be starve

I would assume not everybody who is now in the click bait "journalism" and blog spam business could actually be a journalist. So if those would simply be starved off (which is a big if, bordering on utopia, I admit that), there would be a lot more eyeballs for those who remain; add to that figuring out micro-payments and getting rid of the bloated ad networks (if you must have ads, display a few curated ones for things you actually can endorse), and suddenly the situation is a lot less bleak. If there was "free food" but after a while it was watered down so much and had so many additives that it just made you sick and left you hungry, why wouldn't you go back to normal food? Yes, it's infinitely more expensive than "free", but getting sick from it and still being hungry also has all sorts of hidden costs. So, where's the free market with people operating in their own interest, right?

icebraining 10y ago
add to that figuring out micro-payments That sounds like "the proof is left as an exercise for the reader."
- PavlovsCat 10y ago
  Sure, but remove any mention of micro-payments from my comment and the point is unchanged. I would consider it a minor and optional detail, at least compared to people caring enough about the quality of journalism that hacks would have no audience. I did call that utopian after all. But just because there is a big distance between here and there doesn't mean there's not a "there" there, and if people cared enough, they would find a way. Yes, it's vague, but this island seems to be sinking, the next one looks better to me; that's all I can say from here. People liking instant gratification over attention spans and smart long-term decisions is not something to adapt to, much less exploit, it's something that we will either deal with, or something that will deal with us. And in regards to micro-payments I think it would also help if anonymity wasn't under attack so much. When people seriously drive towards abolishing cash in the physical world, of course introducing the equivalent of cash on the web can't really work; I'm not saying it would be necessarily trivial otherwise, but there's a really hostile climate towards it on top of it. It's also a political and social problem, not just a technical one.
- nitrogen 10y ago
  The ITU spent a bunch of time figuring out how to make different payment schemes work on the Internet. For the most part we do not want them, but maybe some of the pieces can be used to implement micropayments, carefully so as to avoid the Comcast/Netflix extortion problems the other parts of the ITU proposals could create (AIUI/IIRC).

icebraining 10y ago

add to that figuring out micro-payments That sounds like "the proof is left as an exercise for the reader."

PavlovsCat 10y ago
Sure, but remove any mention of micro-payments from my comment and the point is unchanged. I would consider it a minor and optional detail, at least compared to people caring enough about the quality of journalism that hacks would have no audience. I did call that utopian after all. But just because there is a big distance between here and there doesn't mean there's not a "there" there, and if people cared enough, they would find a way. Yes, it's vague, but this island seems to be sinking, the next one looks better to me; that's all I can say from here. People liking instant gratification over attention spans and smart long-term decisions is not something to adapt to, much less exploit, it's something that we will either deal with, or something that will deal with us. And in regards to micro-payments I think it would also help if anonymity wasn't under attack so much. When people seriously drive towards abolishing cash in the physical world, of course introducing the equivalent of cash on the web can't really work; I'm not saying it would be necessarily trivial otherwise, but there's a really hostile climate towards it on top of it. It's also a political and social problem, not just a technical one.
nitrogen 10y ago
The ITU spent a bunch of time figuring out how to make different payment schemes work on the Internet. For the most part we do not want them, but maybe some of the pieces can be used to implement micropayments, carefully so as to avoid the Comcast/Netflix extortion problems the other parts of the ITU proposals could create (AIUI/IIRC).