9 ms·

Brainjunk and the killing of the internet mind

79 points by everdev 9y ago

0xfeba 9y ago
Well, this is what BAT is supposed to help fix.
NegativeLatency 9y ago
TechCrunch has some good articles, and does good reporting sometimes, but there's some irony in this article coming from them.
- meow1032 9y ago
  I think they acknowledged this in the last couple sentences. The article is talking less about what is good or bad reporting, and more about what is a sustainable financial model for good reporting.
walterbell 9y ago
>The bulk of my friends don’t pay for subscriptions. The bulk of the internet doesn’t pay for subscriptions. People will gladly spend hours a day reading brainjunk, to avoid even the slightest expense that might improve the quality of what they are reading. There are non-subscription models, e.g. people pay for ebooks. There are niche subscriptions, e.g. finance, health, which cost much more than Netflix. Some websites have occasional article gems, but there's no way to pay for a high quality, non-DRM, indexable, offline readable, surveillance-free PDF/A version.
- eitland 9y ago
  Agree. > There are non-subscription models, e.g. people pay for ebooks. Another nice example is Blendle. While there exist good reasons to pay for quality journalism there's no reason why I should pay a monthly subscription to every news outlet I ever want to read anything from.
GuiA 9y ago
”Enjoy content. Not too much. Mostly paid [...] if you actually want to learn, to improve your mind, to improve your awareness and understanding of the world, you have to shell out.” The “paid” part seems awfully arbitrary. I went to a great exhibit the other night, where I got to see wonderful photography, for free. I just read a great biology paper published for free by the Royal Society on my way to work. And I am now listening to a fascinating NPR podcast, also downloaded for free. I guess my taxes paid for all of those in some way (even though I only lived in the UK for a year, so that was a meager contribution to the Royal Society’s coffers), but I wouldn’t say I “shelled out” for all these things.
- colanderman 9y ago
  On a thread about a week ago another commenter also pointed out that some of the best content on the web is in (free) sites maintained by hobbyists, on some specialized topic or other, and that this content is more often than not difficult to find because it doesn't SEO well. (Which should be a strong indicator that Google's SEO algorithm is wildly broken from a user's point of view. But at this point, Google, the de-facto search and web advertisement monopoly, has no incentive to prioritize quality content, and every incentive to prioritize content that brings them ad revenue. Which garbage content, presented poorly, is great at doing.) Some days I long for DMOZ…
- commandlinefan 9y ago
  Well, not that I don't believe that there is a lot of good, free content out there - on the web and off - I have found that, when I want to learn a new technology like Git, or Scala, or Angular, the $30 or so I spend on an O'Reilly book is well worth the time I save plodding through incomplete blog posts or sparsely maintained documentation pages.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  You've just hit on what's almost certainly the answer: tax-financed content. Information is a public good. It should be financed as public goods are: via taxes, based on ability to pay (e.g., progressive taxation). "At the Graduate Center, we believe knowledge is a public good. This idea inspires our research, teaching, and public events. We invite you to join us for timely discussions, diverse cultural perspectives, and thought-provoking ideas." https://www.gc.cuny.edu/Public-Programming/GC-Presents https://www.gc.cuny.edu/Public-Programming/GC-Presents Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325. http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343.pdf http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...
temp-dude-87844 9y ago
I wonder, where does this assertion come from, that "readers crave brainjunk at the expense of all other quality content"? The surrounding sentences suggest that the author genuinely believes that demand came (and comes) first, and "media companies have been more than happy to oblige". I posit that this is a load of crock. Free "junky" content is popular simply because it's free and plentiful, and has a vastly, unquantifiably lower barrier to entry than paid content -- and not because it's dopamine-releasing junk. It's popular because it's accessible, requires little cognitive load to evaluate ahead of time, and its momentary consumption is noncommittal. If article mills stopped producing throwaway clickbait to fill an Outbrain footer, the corresponding "demand" would plummet. But this content keeps being produced, because business models on the web suck, so every publisher feels they have to put some eggs into advertising. Because reader attention has an upper bound, one publisher's gain is quite often another's loss, and this directly translates into advertising revenue. Given the low appetite for the masses to pay, Apple, Google, Facebook, Medium, and incumbent news publications have all tried to solve this problem in ways that further integrate advertising, analytics, and personalized suggestions, and these efforts continue to face challenges due to the misalignment of incentives.
- hathawsh 9y ago
  YouTube Red is a nice exception. For $10 per month, I get no ads, and some portion of my fee goes to the creators of the videos I watch. I've already taken the time to subscribe to certain creators, so now my YouTube feed is high quality with little noise. If Google revealed exactly how much of my subscription is going to creators, I think it would be easier to convince more people to sign up. I'd like to see other services try a similar model.
  - stryk 9y ago
    A lot, most even, of the channels I subscribe to do not even care about YouTube monetization any more. They get most of their operating revenue from outside sources like Patreon, merchandise sales, affiliate linking to e-commerce sites, etc. The general consenus seems to be, in a nutshell: It's just not worth it -- YouTube/Google's algorithmic approach to monetization and what is and what's not "advertiser friendly" (whatever the hell that means, I don't think Google themselves know at this point) is an absolute schooolbus fire. Also how they handle "strikes" is a hot, hot mess. Google can pull the rug out from under you overnight on a whim for quite literally no good reason and there's nothing you can do about it because there's no one to call, e-mail, or talk to unless you're one of the big channels that have millions and millions of subscribers. I get that the scale of YouTube is far too big to do it by human hands & eyes, but the approach they're taking currently is flat out failing.
njacobs5074 9y ago
Echoing the sentiment that some of the best content is free is exactly why the only news app I have on my phone is for reading Hacker News. I value the level of comments here just as much and sometimes more than the articles people share
ungzd 9y ago
TLDR: mainstream news media says to read more mainstream news media and pay for it.
jarjoura 9y ago
This is a terrible article. It leads with social commentary about supposed healthy amounts of content, and then goes on to describe the shake-up at LA Times because the editor got pulled into the #metoo fiasco. Harvey Weinstein arguably produced some of the best content in Hollywood during his tenure, and so the two shouldn't be coupled. Yea, fire the dude and move on, but don't make this about cheap content, and don't make this also about the press failing to generate revenue. All very different things and misses the nuance of what is going on.
ameister14 9y ago
I've been reading the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall St. Journal, BBC and others for a long time now; most of what I see published isn't improving my mind, awareness, or store of useful knowledge. Some of it is flat out wrong. As I became more and more educated on certain topics I noticed this more and more - articles about a field I know a lot about often get the details wrong, and draw the wrong conclusions because of it. I'm reasonably sure this isn't unique to my fields of expertise. That has nothing to do with paid/free, but if someone is going to say I should pay them to provide me with knowledge, I'd like to be sure they actually possess said knowledge, consistently. As it is, different papers are good for different things and almost completely untrustworthy for others. By virtue of a subscription, I subsidize both.
- heurist 9y ago
  I've fallen back to collecting textbooks for any substantive content.
- thundergolfer 9y ago
  What you're saying appears quite related to the Murray Gell-Man effect, which if cashed out in reality calls into question the value of reading the news as a way to become informed. https://seekerblog.com/2006/01/31/the-murray-gell-mann-amnesia-effect/ https://seekerblog.com/2006/01/31/the-murray-gell-mann-amnes...
- mistermann 9y ago
  At least those people might be trying. I find it hard to read anything today without major bias and misleading half truths. Mainstream news is in very serious trouble and I don't know how society can save it with everyone having their claws out. We need a new leader, but who could do it?
tomxor 9y ago
> So let me propose a little framework: “Enjoy content. Not too much. Mostly paid”. High quality, good free content can still be found on the web. Some people, including me, actually like the idea of giving away content for free. I found a pretty strong visual content filter is the bling factor: you know, those extremely insightful old fashioned no bullshit plain html sites with minimal CSS, and no ads... One of the reasons they don't really need ads is because it costs pennies to host and serve KiBs of content, there is no "platform" or "ad engines" or any of that nonsense, it's just some people who want to share some insights, they write some static html and throw it up for pennies because it's KiBs. This style of content authoring tends towards good content because it's not prone to hunt for eyeballs... it's just there, there is no difference to the author or the content's existence regardless of how many views and clicks happen. That said it doesn't have to look crude, It's some clean minimal CSS design can improve the legibility of the content immensely without bloating it - it's just less common.
- ryanianian 9y ago
  I agree with your overall premise - that attention-seeking ads and whatnot is usually an indicator of bad content, but not always. It's hard for authors to do this full-time without advertising. Who pays them if not users or advertisers? Hobbyists and amateur publishers are one thing, but people who do things and write about them full-time are searching for a way to support themselves. I would replace "no ads" in your comment with "respectful and honest ads" (and even better if those ad fees are paid directly to the author or a small distributor that is being selective about matching ads to pages).
  - tomxor 9y ago
    > It's hard for authors to do this full-time without advertising. Who pays them if not users or advertisers? Hobbyists and amateur publishers are one thing, but people who do things and write about them full-time are searching for a way to support themselves. This is just my opinion: but I think this is the so called "problem" that people need to not solve... medium keep talking about "how can we replace the ad model", and hey, maybe in "reporting" style content this is a legitimate problem, but going forward I don't see it applying to a lot of written content, people with insightful things to write about often have those insights because they do something other than writing for a living. Directly making monkey off literature in the traditional sense is not necessary - but making the literature can indirectly make you monkey by e.g improving your employment prospects if that's important to you, not to mention writing literature can be an enjoyable art form in itself.
Spearchucker 9y ago
I'm as ok with the rot-inducing content as I am with junk food. I don't go near junk food and so stay slim with minimal effort (I'm just past middle age). I find muscle dysmorphia repugnant and so haven't gone too far in that direction either. And so it is with content. I read quality books. James Clavell, Robert Ruark or Frederick Forsyth for example, over J. K. Rowling or E.L James, for instance. I source my news with care, and if a story interests me I look for counter positions or arguments. We all have this choice. One path makes you look stupid, and, in comparison, the other makes you look interesting, learned and intelligent. Amongst other benefits. Like I said this is a choice we all make. Regardless of income (junk food is expensive, and libraries are free).
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
CM30 9y ago
I love the assumption that all the free content is 'junk' and the paid content is somehow better. In my experience, it's the free stuff from hobbyists that's often better than the stuff printed by professional publications, since they care about the topic rather than meaningless clicks and ad analytics. Because the thing is: > But if you actually want to learn, to improve your mind, to improve your awareness and understanding of the world, you have to shell out. I don't need to shell out anything. I can find perfectly good content from people that care for free, and I myself write perfectly good content for people that are interested in the topic and provide it for free. The people that want good content don't need to pay for it, they can find for it free. And the people who don't care for good content now... Probably weren't caring much for it in the past either. Do you really think the folks that read the tabloid papers (or the Daily Mail) wanted a super deep, thought provoking piece that questions every bit of their world view? That the people who watch cable news shows or what not were going to pay for something from a professional organisation? That wasn't going to happen, and it didn't. Instead, the people who wanted good content found they could get good content elsewhere, the ones who wanted mediocre content found they could get the same stuff elsewhere and the old media are left in a situation where they're really not the best at either of these things.
- Slansitartop 9y ago
  > I don't need to shell out anything. I can find perfectly good content from people that care for free, and I myself write perfectly good content for people that are interested in the topic and provide it for free. What kind of content is this, exactly? I think you're missing the forest by focusing on a few unique trees. I agree, you're likely to find far better free stuff about tinkering around with microcontrollers (for instance) that are written by hobbyists than you will from paid publications. Taken all together, though, that kind of stuff is ultimately very limited and misses whole universes of valuable areas. For instance: news reporting, history books, etc. require a breadth of attention and effort to create that just isn't possible with a day job. If you want to "improve your mind, to improve your awareness and understanding of the world" you can't hyper-focus on hobbies.
  - marnett 9y ago
montrose 9y ago
It's not simply miserliness that makes people reluctant to pay for articles online. It's also because subscribing is so much work. If you could pay 50 cents for an article with a single button click, a lot of people would do it. But filling out a subscription form and getting out your credit card and typing in a 16 digit number off it just to read a single article (which is all one wants at the point one is being asked to subscribe) seems like way too much work.
- tcmb 9y ago
  And what is more, am I supposed to subscribe to all sites where I occasionally find valuable content? One of the good things about internet journalism is that I can read different publications very easily, every day. Some of them I'd actually like to pay, but not by way of a subscription, because paying for five or ten subscriptions at ~$30 per month each is just too much. With paper newspapers, I can at least buy a single issue. With online articles, it would be feasible to pay per article, heck, even per half articles or whatever. But for some reason all the publishers come up with is obnoxious paywalls, and the option to subscribe or get lost. I honestly don't understand why micropayments haven't become a thing for online journalism.
  - fian 9y ago
    Is there potential for a news article broker to sit between the readers and the major news sites? For example you credit an account on a news broker then when younwant to read an article the article access fee is deducted from your account. That avoids readers needed to subscribe to many newspapers or magazines and would provide a more friction free way to access specific articles.
    - tcmb 9y ago
      Yes, something like that would work. I guess the biggest problem is to get the major publishers as well as the readers to work with this broker. Flattr had a similar problem, you could pay-per-article via their button, but as I understand the adoption just wasn't sufficient, by both publishers and readers. Maybe if publishers could add a micropayment button that used ApplePay/GooglePay/AmazonPay/PayPal, so that readers wouldn't have to sign up for an additional service and could just use their credit card in a one-click transaction.
hmhrex 9y ago
Not sure if it was intentional, but Crichton here uses the same Pollan metaphor that Johnson makes in his book, The Information Diet. In fact the tagline is right on his site: http://informationdiet.com/ http://informationdiet.com/ I just got finished reading the Information Diet a couple weeks ago and was pretty disappointed in the book overall. Same with this article. Both seem to have a problem that I agree with: we should be more intentional about the information we consume. However, the "solution" in both isn't fully realized or it's tainted with an agenda of some sort. I'm really ready for a good book on this topic as I raise my kids in the junk knowledge/misinformation age. Anybody have any recommendations?
- stinkytaco 9y ago
  Are you looking for a solution, or more information? _The information: a theory, a flood_ by James Gleick is good. I read it because I'm in that line of work, but I think it's a good summary of why content is produced and what the challenges are. You could also do something like _The shallows_ by Nicholas Carr, which is more of polemic than anything else, though I did enjoy it. Perhaps _You are not a gadget_ by Jaron Lanier or _Hamlet's Blackberry_ by William Powers, but neither of those are books I could finish. Finally, I read _Deep work_ not long ago and thought it was pretty good.
  - hmhrex 9y ago
    Definitely looking for a solution. I actually loved Lanier's "You Are Not A Gadget", it was the first deep dive of technology philosophy that I've ever read, and was definitely worth finishing. I'll definitely check out some of these other ones you mention. Thanks for the recommendations!
InclinedPlane 9y ago
This is silly. There is a ton of high quality free content on the internet. What matters is taking the time and putting in the effort to ensure that you're consuming higher quality content. Even wikipedia is worthwhile as a basic introductory or survey level overview for lots of different subjects (it's hard to know what to dig into and study in depth in some area without having a general understanding first). And there is absolutely a ton of excellent free material on youtube, of all places. Tons and tons of DIY and how-to videos. Woodworking, machining, electronics, knitting, sewing, cooking, the internet is a treasure trove of data. And some of the best educational content on linear algebra and calculus in the Universe at any price is on youtube for free (from 3blue1brown). Overall this critique strikes me as generationalist and classist.

79 points by everdev 9y ago

Well, this is what BAT is supposed to help fix.

TechCrunch has some good articles, and does good reporting sometimes, but there's some irony in this article coming from them.

meow1032 9y ago
I think they acknowledged this in the last couple sentences. The article is talking less about what is good or bad reporting, and more about what is a sustainable financial model for good reporting.

walterbell 9y ago

>The bulk of my friends don’t pay for subscriptions. The bulk of the internet doesn’t pay for subscriptions. People will gladly spend hours a day reading brainjunk, to avoid even the slightest expense that might improve the quality of what they are reading. There are non-subscription models, e.g. people pay for ebooks. There are niche subscriptions, e.g. finance, health, which cost much more than Netflix. Some websites have occasional article gems, but there's no way to pay for a high quality, non-DRM, indexable, offline readable, surveillance-free PDF/A version.

eitland 9y ago
Agree. > There are non-subscription models, e.g. people pay for ebooks. Another nice example is Blendle. While there exist good reasons to pay for quality journalism there's no reason why I should pay a monthly subscription to every news outlet I ever want to read anything from.

GuiA 9y ago

”Enjoy content. Not too much. Mostly paid [...] if you actually want to learn, to improve your mind, to improve your awareness and understanding of the world, you have to shell out.” The “paid” part seems awfully arbitrary. I went to a great exhibit the other night, where I got to see wonderful photography, for free. I just read a great biology paper published for free by the Royal Society on my way to work. And I am now listening to a fascinating NPR podcast, also downloaded for free. I guess my taxes paid for all of those in some way (even though I only lived in the UK for a year, so that was a meager contribution to the Royal Society’s coffers), but I wouldn’t say I “shelled out” for all these things.

colanderman 9y ago
On a thread about a week ago another commenter also pointed out that some of the best content on the web is in (free) sites maintained by hobbyists, on some specialized topic or other, and that this content is more often than not difficult to find because it doesn't SEO well. (Which should be a strong indicator that Google's SEO algorithm is wildly broken from a user's point of view. But at this point, Google, the de-facto search and web advertisement monopoly, has no incentive to prioritize quality content, and every incentive to prioritize content that brings them ad revenue. Which garbage content, presented poorly, is great at doing.) Some days I long for DMOZ…
commandlinefan 9y ago
Well, not that I don't believe that there is a lot of good, free content out there - on the web and off - I have found that, when I want to learn a new technology like Git, or Scala, or Angular, the $30 or so I spend on an O'Reilly book is well worth the time I save plodding through incomplete blog posts or sparsely maintained documentation pages.
dredmorbius 9y ago
You've just hit on what's almost certainly the answer: tax-financed content. Information is a public good. It should be financed as public goods are: via taxes, based on ability to pay (e.g., progressive taxation). "At the Graduate Center, we believe knowledge is a public good. This idea inspires our research, teaching, and public events. We invite you to join us for timely discussions, diverse cultural perspectives, and thought-provoking ideas." https://www.gc.cuny.edu/Public-Programming/GC-Presents https://www.gc.cuny.edu/Public-Programming/GC-Presents Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325. http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343.pdf http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...

temp-dude-87844 9y ago

I wonder, where does this assertion come from, that "readers crave brainjunk at the expense of all other quality content"? The surrounding sentences suggest that the author genuinely believes that demand came (and comes) first, and "media companies have been more than happy to oblige". I posit that this is a load of crock. Free "junky" content is popular simply because it's free and plentiful, and has a vastly, unquantifiably lower barrier to entry than paid content -- and not because it's dopamine-releasing junk. It's popular because it's accessible, requires little cognitive load to evaluate ahead of time, and its momentary consumption is noncommittal. If article mills stopped producing throwaway clickbait to fill an Outbrain footer, the corresponding "demand" would plummet. But this content keeps being produced, because business models on the web suck, so every publisher feels they have to put some eggs into advertising. Because reader attention has an upper bound, one publisher's gain is quite often another's loss, and this directly translates into advertising revenue. Given the low appetite for the masses to pay, Apple, Google, Facebook, Medium, and incumbent news publications have all tried to solve this problem in ways that further integrate advertising, analytics, and personalized suggestions, and these efforts continue to face challenges due to the misalignment of incentives.

hathawsh 9y ago
YouTube Red is a nice exception. For $10 per month, I get no ads, and some portion of my fee goes to the creators of the videos I watch. I've already taken the time to subscribe to certain creators, so now my YouTube feed is high quality with little noise. If Google revealed exactly how much of my subscription is going to creators, I think it would be easier to convince more people to sign up. I'd like to see other services try a similar model.
- stryk 9y ago
  A lot, most even, of the channels I subscribe to do not even care about YouTube monetization any more. They get most of their operating revenue from outside sources like Patreon, merchandise sales, affiliate linking to e-commerce sites, etc. The general consenus seems to be, in a nutshell: It's just not worth it -- YouTube/Google's algorithmic approach to monetization and what is and what's not "advertiser friendly" (whatever the hell that means, I don't think Google themselves know at this point) is an absolute schooolbus fire. Also how they handle "strikes" is a hot, hot mess. Google can pull the rug out from under you overnight on a whim for quite literally no good reason and there's nothing you can do about it because there's no one to call, e-mail, or talk to unless you're one of the big channels that have millions and millions of subscribers. I get that the scale of YouTube is far too big to do it by human hands & eyes, but the approach they're taking currently is flat out failing.

njacobs5074 9y ago

Echoing the sentiment that some of the best content is free is exactly why the only news app I have on my phone is for reading Hacker News. I value the level of comments here just as much and sometimes more than the articles people share

ungzd 9y ago

TLDR: mainstream news media says to read more mainstream news media and pay for it.

jarjoura 9y ago

This is a terrible article. It leads with social commentary about supposed healthy amounts of content, and then goes on to describe the shake-up at LA Times because the editor got pulled into the #metoo fiasco. Harvey Weinstein arguably produced some of the best content in Hollywood during his tenure, and so the two shouldn't be coupled. Yea, fire the dude and move on, but don't make this about cheap content, and don't make this also about the press failing to generate revenue. All very different things and misses the nuance of what is going on.

ameister14 9y ago

I've been reading the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall St. Journal, BBC and others for a long time now; most of what I see published isn't improving my mind, awareness, or store of useful knowledge. Some of it is flat out wrong. As I became more and more educated on certain topics I noticed this more and more - articles about a field I know a lot about often get the details wrong, and draw the wrong conclusions because of it. I'm reasonably sure this isn't unique to my fields of expertise. That has nothing to do with paid/free, but if someone is going to say I should pay them to provide me with knowledge, I'd like to be sure they actually possess said knowledge, consistently. As it is, different papers are good for different things and almost completely untrustworthy for others. By virtue of a subscription, I subsidize both.

heurist 9y ago
I've fallen back to collecting textbooks for any substantive content.
thundergolfer 9y ago
What you're saying appears quite related to the Murray Gell-Man effect, which if cashed out in reality calls into question the value of reading the news as a way to become informed. https://seekerblog.com/2006/01/31/the-murray-gell-mann-amnesia-effect/ https://seekerblog.com/2006/01/31/the-murray-gell-mann-amnes...
mistermann 9y ago
At least those people might be trying. I find it hard to read anything today without major bias and misleading half truths. Mainstream news is in very serious trouble and I don't know how society can save it with everyone having their claws out. We need a new leader, but who could do it?

tomxor 9y ago

> So let me propose a little framework: “Enjoy content. Not too much. Mostly paid”. High quality, good free content can still be found on the web. Some people, including me, actually like the idea of giving away content for free. I found a pretty strong visual content filter is the bling factor: you know, those extremely insightful old fashioned no bullshit plain html sites with minimal CSS, and no ads... One of the reasons they don't really need ads is because it costs pennies to host and serve KiBs of content, there is no "platform" or "ad engines" or any of that nonsense, it's just some people who want to share some insights, they write some static html and throw it up for pennies because it's KiBs. This style of content authoring tends towards good content because it's not prone to hunt for eyeballs... it's just there, there is no difference to the author or the content's existence regardless of how many views and clicks happen. That said it doesn't have to look crude, It's some clean minimal CSS design can improve the legibility of the content immensely without bloating it - it's just less common.

ryanianian 9y ago
I agree with your overall premise - that attention-seeking ads and whatnot is usually an indicator of bad content, but not always. It's hard for authors to do this full-time without advertising. Who pays them if not users or advertisers? Hobbyists and amateur publishers are one thing, but people who do things and write about them full-time are searching for a way to support themselves. I would replace "no ads" in your comment with "respectful and honest ads" (and even better if those ad fees are paid directly to the author or a small distributor that is being selective about matching ads to pages).
- tomxor 9y ago
  > It's hard for authors to do this full-time without advertising. Who pays them if not users or advertisers? Hobbyists and amateur publishers are one thing, but people who do things and write about them full-time are searching for a way to support themselves. This is just my opinion: but I think this is the so called "problem" that people need to not solve... medium keep talking about "how can we replace the ad model", and hey, maybe in "reporting" style content this is a legitimate problem, but going forward I don't see it applying to a lot of written content, people with insightful things to write about often have those insights because they do something other than writing for a living. Directly making monkey off literature in the traditional sense is not necessary - but making the literature can indirectly make you monkey by e.g improving your employment prospects if that's important to you, not to mention writing literature can be an enjoyable art form in itself.

Spearchucker 9y ago

I'm as ok with the rot-inducing content as I am with junk food. I don't go near junk food and so stay slim with minimal effort (I'm just past middle age). I find muscle dysmorphia repugnant and so haven't gone too far in that direction either. And so it is with content. I read quality books. James Clavell, Robert Ruark or Frederick Forsyth for example, over J. K. Rowling or E.L James, for instance. I source my news with care, and if a story interests me I look for counter positions or arguments. We all have this choice. One path makes you look stupid, and, in comparison, the other makes you look interesting, learned and intelligent. Amongst other benefits. Like I said this is a choice we all make. Regardless of income (junk food is expensive, and libraries are free).

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

CM30 9y ago

I love the assumption that all the free content is 'junk' and the paid content is somehow better. In my experience, it's the free stuff from hobbyists that's often better than the stuff printed by professional publications, since they care about the topic rather than meaningless clicks and ad analytics. Because the thing is: > But if you actually want to learn, to improve your mind, to improve your awareness and understanding of the world, you have to shell out. I don't need to shell out anything. I can find perfectly good content from people that care for free, and I myself write perfectly good content for people that are interested in the topic and provide it for free. The people that want good content don't need to pay for it, they can find for it free. And the people who don't care for good content now... Probably weren't caring much for it in the past either. Do you really think the folks that read the tabloid papers (or the Daily Mail) wanted a super deep, thought provoking piece that questions every bit of their world view? That the people who watch cable news shows or what not were going to pay for something from a professional organisation? That wasn't going to happen, and it didn't. Instead, the people who wanted good content found they could get good content elsewhere, the ones who wanted mediocre content found they could get the same stuff elsewhere and the old media are left in a situation where they're really not the best at either of these things.

Slansitartop 9y ago
> I don't need to shell out anything. I can find perfectly good content from people that care for free, and I myself write perfectly good content for people that are interested in the topic and provide it for free. What kind of content is this, exactly? I think you're missing the forest by focusing on a few unique trees. I agree, you're likely to find far better free stuff about tinkering around with microcontrollers (for instance) that are written by hobbyists than you will from paid publications. Taken all together, though, that kind of stuff is ultimately very limited and misses whole universes of valuable areas. For instance: news reporting, history books, etc. require a breadth of attention and effort to create that just isn't possible with a day job. If you want to "improve your mind, to improve your awareness and understanding of the world" you can't hyper-focus on hobbies.
- marnett 9y ago

montrose 9y ago

It's not simply miserliness that makes people reluctant to pay for articles online. It's also because subscribing is so much work. If you could pay 50 cents for an article with a single button click, a lot of people would do it. But filling out a subscription form and getting out your credit card and typing in a 16 digit number off it just to read a single article (which is all one wants at the point one is being asked to subscribe) seems like way too much work.

tcmb 9y ago
And what is more, am I supposed to subscribe to all sites where I occasionally find valuable content? One of the good things about internet journalism is that I can read different publications very easily, every day. Some of them I'd actually like to pay, but not by way of a subscription, because paying for five or ten subscriptions at ~$30 per month each is just too much. With paper newspapers, I can at least buy a single issue. With online articles, it would be feasible to pay per article, heck, even per half articles or whatever. But for some reason all the publishers come up with is obnoxious paywalls, and the option to subscribe or get lost. I honestly don't understand why micropayments haven't become a thing for online journalism.
- fian 9y ago
  Is there potential for a news article broker to sit between the readers and the major news sites? For example you credit an account on a news broker then when younwant to read an article the article access fee is deducted from your account. That avoids readers needed to subscribe to many newspapers or magazines and would provide a more friction free way to access specific articles.
  - tcmb 9y ago
    Yes, something like that would work. I guess the biggest problem is to get the major publishers as well as the readers to work with this broker. Flattr had a similar problem, you could pay-per-article via their button, but as I understand the adoption just wasn't sufficient, by both publishers and readers. Maybe if publishers could add a micropayment button that used ApplePay/GooglePay/AmazonPay/PayPal, so that readers wouldn't have to sign up for an additional service and could just use their credit card in a one-click transaction.

hmhrex 9y ago

Not sure if it was intentional, but Crichton here uses the same Pollan metaphor that Johnson makes in his book, The Information Diet. In fact the tagline is right on his site: http://informationdiet.com/ http://informationdiet.com/ I just got finished reading the Information Diet a couple weeks ago and was pretty disappointed in the book overall. Same with this article. Both seem to have a problem that I agree with: we should be more intentional about the information we consume. However, the "solution" in both isn't fully realized or it's tainted with an agenda of some sort. I'm really ready for a good book on this topic as I raise my kids in the junk knowledge/misinformation age. Anybody have any recommendations?

stinkytaco 9y ago
Are you looking for a solution, or more information? _The information: a theory, a flood_ by James Gleick is good. I read it because I'm in that line of work, but I think it's a good summary of why content is produced and what the challenges are. You could also do something like _The shallows_ by Nicholas Carr, which is more of polemic than anything else, though I did enjoy it. Perhaps _You are not a gadget_ by Jaron Lanier or _Hamlet's Blackberry_ by William Powers, but neither of those are books I could finish. Finally, I read _Deep work_ not long ago and thought it was pretty good.
- hmhrex 9y ago
  Definitely looking for a solution. I actually loved Lanier's "You Are Not A Gadget", it was the first deep dive of technology philosophy that I've ever read, and was definitely worth finishing. I'll definitely check out some of these other ones you mention. Thanks for the recommendations!

InclinedPlane 9y ago

This is silly. There is a ton of high quality free content on the internet. What matters is taking the time and putting in the effort to ensure that you're consuming higher quality content. Even wikipedia is worthwhile as a basic introductory or survey level overview for lots of different subjects (it's hard to know what to dig into and study in depth in some area without having a general understanding first). And there is absolutely a ton of excellent free material on youtube, of all places. Tons and tons of DIY and how-to videos. Woodworking, machining, electronics, knitting, sewing, cooking, the internet is a treasure trove of data. And some of the best educational content on linear algebra and calculus in the Universe at any price is on youtube for free (from 3blue1brown). Overall this critique strikes me as generationalist and classist.