> Think video game streamers producing mindless content all day long, and asking for donations that allow viewers to get a flair next to their name or an in-str

> Think video game streamers producing mindless content all day long, and asking for donations that allow viewers to get a flair next to their name or an in-stream callout of some chosen sentence. You get what you pay for. If the product is mindless to begin with, I do not think this proves any point. It would be different if stream was paid to begin with. > Ads have been in journalism for a long time. You still paid for the newspaper, meaning an economic transactio happend where you valued the content at some price point and were ready to pay. That meant content had to pass at least some quality threshold. Replacing this with fully free, ad-supported content totally changed incentives. Now the content can be of zero value (which it in most cases is) and will still be consumed because it is free.