3 ms·

I'm running out of time - and I just signed up for Dithering which I think is well worth the money :-)

by 2sk21 6y ago

fossuser 6y ago
Yeah me too, moving from standard publishing to really high quality independent publishers is a huge improvement. I hope most of news media trends this direction. The brands of even famous papers like the NYT don't mean much to me when they also publish a lot of bad content. I want to follow and support individual writers like Li Yuan (https://twitter.com/LiYuan6 https://twitter.com/LiYuan6, who wrote this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/business/china-coronavirus-amnesia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/business/china-coronaviru...). I'm happy to pay these individuals for the work they do, but I don't want to pay for a paper that has some quality writers among a bunch of garbage inside of a primarily ad-driven business model. Vox publishes a lot of great stuff, but they also publish Kara Swisher and terrible articles like that handshake one about Covid-19. I don't want to support the bad along with the good. Let me pay individual people like Steven Levy directly - I want writers to become their own independent publishers. I'm happy some are already doing this, but I think there's an opportunity for someone to solve the discovery problem here and make it better. A long time ago individual videogame developers were famous, but at some point the effort required to make a modern "AAA" game scaled up over the abilities for an individual to be able to do it themselves. For writing the opposite happened with the internet, and costs to publish cratered. Since cost to publish and distribute isn't really a constraint anymore, individuals should own their own brand and publish themselves under their own reputation. Ben Thompson, Sam Harris, and Preet Bharara are all doing this. There should be more. Even in games (where the constraint still exists) we still have successful indies. We can probably help, not by making yet another centralized Medium type of site that obscures the writer's name and reputation to own their traffic, but by making it easy for writer's to spin up their own entirely owned publishing site (host, domain, mailing list, etc.) The barrier to entry to do this without giving up your ownership is too high - non-technical writers are not going to use github pages or configure some DNS CNAME. That said, the quality of the first few people that have figured out how to do this well makes me optimistic for this kind of future.

I'm running out of time - and I just signed up for Dithering which I think is well worth the money :-)

by 2sk21 6y ago

I'm running out of time - and I just signed up for Dithering which I think is well worth the money :-)

Yeah me too, moving from standard publishing to really high quality independent publishers is a huge improvement. I hope most of news media trends this direction. The brands of even famous papers like the NYT don't mean much to me when they also publish a lot of bad content. I want to follow and support individual writers like Li Yuan (https://twitter.com/LiYuan6 https://twitter.com/LiYuan6, who wrote this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/business/china-coronavirus-amnesia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/business/china-coronaviru...). I'm happy to pay these individuals for the work they do, but I don't want to pay for a paper that has some quality writers among a bunch of garbage inside of a primarily ad-driven business model. Vox publishes a lot of great stuff, but they also publish Kara Swisher and terrible articles like that handshake one about Covid-19. I don't want to support the bad along with the good. Let me pay individual people like Steven Levy directly - I want writers to become their own independent publishers. I'm happy some are already doing this, but I think there's an opportunity for someone to solve the discovery problem here and make it better. A long time ago individual videogame developers were famous, but at some point the effort required to make a modern "AAA" game scaled up over the abilities for an individual to be able to do it themselves. For writing the opposite happened with the internet, and costs to publish cratered. Since cost to publish and distribute isn't really a constraint anymore, individuals should own their own brand and publish themselves under their own reputation. Ben Thompson, Sam Harris, and Preet Bharara are all doing this. There should be more. Even in games (where the constraint still exists) we still have successful indies. We can probably help, not by making yet another centralized Medium type of site that obscures the writer's name and reputation to own their traffic, but by making it easy for writer's to spin up their own entirely owned publishing site (host, domain, mailing list, etc.) The barrier to entry to do this without giving up your ownership is too high - non-technical writers are not going to use github pages or configure some DNS CNAME. That said, the quality of the first few people that have figured out how to do this well makes me optimistic for this kind of future.