4 ms·

People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now. I miss the old days too. And

People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now. I miss the old days too. And even now that independently-made, non-ad-supported content is what I prefer most. Spent a lot of years creating it myself. But let's not be naive. Not all art or journalism can be created that way. There is a lot of stuff that just doesn't happen unless somebody is working on it full-time. And since people need money to live, the people making that stuff need money. For example, imagine the sorts of investigative journalism where somebody might spend months or years researching a story. One that might not even pan out. That's not something you can realistically do, part-time, for free, while earning a living doing something else as your day job. Expecting everything to be free, and also ad-free, because it was created by some hobbyist in their spare time while they do something else for a living severely restricts the amount of people who can create and the types of things that can be created.

jhoechtl 4y ago
Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning) There are studies where money ruins altruism and pure joy of creating sthg. has to be replaced with a payment which becomes according to Herzberg a hygiene factor and wears out. The --internet-- www as we know it - give it back!
- chii 4y ago
  > Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning) but it eventually had paid sponsorships from companies that make money off it.
- linsomniac 4y ago
  Linux is a VERY different thing than investigative journalism. I can't think of a single bit of investigative journalism someone did as a side project that has spawned an entire industry, but maybe I'm not thinking hard enough. Content costs money to make. Yes, sometimes give via self-funding of the content (without advertisement, like by working a job), and that's fantastic. But we also need a way to support the content that we like, and we can't expect everyone to be able to give.
  - the_third_wave 4y ago
    > Content costs money to make Some content costs money, other content - and how I dislike the word 'content' which turns that which makes the 'net interesting inside-out to make it into a money-making scheme - costs time to make. Not all time is money, lots of it is time spent on activities which people do without the need for payment since they enjoy it. Call it a 'hobby' or 'pastime' if you want, something to do when you're free to do what you want. Some people like to go and watch sports games, others like to sit on the sofa and watch televised drivel while others park themselves in front of a computer to create something. Much of what is created is interesting only to the creator for the act of creation but some of it has value beyond the experience of the creator. That is indeed how the Linux kernel got started, it is how a lot of music is made, artwork is created and more.
  - mejutoco 4y ago
    > I can't think of a single bit of investigative journalism someone did as a side project that has spawned an entire industry Maybe not an entire industry, but Bellingcat has been impactful and it started with a guy commenting on the guardian comments section.
  - jay_kyburz 4y ago
    Investigative journalism, (the media), sometimes referred to as "The Fourth Estate", is too important to be funded by advertising, and should be funded by the people, and be for the people. Just like the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of our governments.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Survivorship bias?
- marcinzm 4y ago
  >Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning) Red Hat started in 1993 and SUSE in 1994. So you got 2 whole years before money entered the picture.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - b112 4y ago
    In the early years, these companies were tiny, struggled to not go out of business. And because they were so small, they contributed very little paid time... anywhere. Linux happened for free.
    - fauigerzigerk 4y ago
      Yes, Linux was started for free as a student project, but the reason why it became the standard choice for data centers is because large corporations like Oracle, IBM and later Google united behind it in order to stop Microsoft from dominating servers. These corporations along with some commercial distributions have been funding Linux development for decades. Linux as we know it today is a child of corporate strategic thinking.
      - SoftTalker 4y ago
        IBM, DEC, Sun, HP and others already had commercial Unix offerings with support that corporate users wanted for servers. Why unite behind Linux, which at the time was inferior to all those others?
        mixmastamyk 4y ago
        To attack Windows from the top and bottom simultaneously. It may seem excessive but MS was in a very strong position at the time. Many of us wondered if anything else would survive.
  - tokai 4y ago
    I'm not against Red Hat but the sentiment that they are ruining Linux is not that uncommon.
- strogonoff 4y ago
  I believe “you create for free and live poor” vs. “you need to monetize your work via ads” is definitely the wrong dichotomy. You can simply create out of inspiration, while having a job that pays your bills (that is actually how a lot of OSS happened). Or you could publish some work openly, while suggesting the reader to buy your book, for example. Over-reliance on ad-based model and the resulting prevalence of double-sided “social” platforms where the advertiser is the customer, actual user needs count for nothing because no one will leave and no honest competitor can compete with “free”, most certainly seems to me to be at the root of a lot of dysfunction—if these platforms make more money from engagement thanks to aggravating inflammatory posts, regardless of whether they are well informed or in good faith, then that’s what they will promote and reward one way or another. The expectation of “free” is part of the problem, sure, but I don’t think that’s the cause. The cause can probably be distilled to “abuse of information asymmetry in free market enabled by regulatory inaction” (free market is great, but in presence of malicious actors it needs some regulation or it stops working). That leads to the aforementioned platforms, then the expectation of “free” and non-appreciation of work published completely for free just out of altruism or to feel pride/recognition, and generally goes counter to how the market is supposed to work.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    It's primarily a cultural difference. In print media ads were fairly tame. They weren't personally targeted and in some contexts they were quite welcome. Although print magazines made most of their money by selling ad pages, the content was largely firewalled. (Byte is a good example. The content was always hacker culture not ad culture.) On the internet, ad culture - not just ads themselves - has consumed everything. Whether it's a YouTube channel owner reminding everyone to like-and-subscribe, or some TikTok nonsense desperately trying to go viral, it's mostly about reach - defined entirely by potential ad spend - and not about the content, which is almost incidental to monetisation. And that's why it's so noisy, and often trivial. In fact I suspect there's a general Gresham's Law principle of cultural systems. As access and delivery become cheaper, content becomes noisier, more trivial, and less culturally valuable. As we go from manual content generation to automated AI content reach will increase, but cultural value - in the sense of challenging, original ideas and experiences that have lasting widespread relevance - will decrease even further.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning) Linux happened mostly through the contributions of the paid developers of the Linux foundation. And still the majority of the commits belong to those developers. And it was possible to do so because the foundation received enough support from major donors, most of which were corporations. If you would want to choose an Open Source success story that wasnt backed by corporations, WordPress would be what you are looking for. But even then, the WordPress ecosystem found a way to fund itself directly through its users. Which means that they are also funded. In contrast, a gigantic amount of Open Source projects were abandoned when its contributors were no longer able to maintain them because life responsibilities started raining on them... Unfortunately any social paradigm, movement or setup must be able to sustain itself economically. The best way to do it is to do it through its users, directly, so that concentrated capital wont be able to take it over.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Linux is the exception that proves the rule. While it is completely free (beer + libre), Google and Facebook exploited numerous Linux-related technologies to turn the internet into a planet-scale ad machine.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    I apologise for my pedantry, but: > the exception that proves the rule To prove the rule is to test the rule; proof spirit is spirit that passes the test, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The exception that proves the rule is the exception that violates it (and shows that the rule is a heuristic, not a law).
waboremo 4y ago
>And since people need money to live And now we're getting to the actual root of the problem.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
  If you make it so people don't need money to live, they'll invent a new currency. People are hardwired to barter.
  - waboremo 4y ago
    That's not even remotely true. Nothing about us is inherent to bartering. That's of course relying on the assumption that we would get rid of money entirely as the only solution.
    - b112 4y ago
      Bartering is an offshoot of "fairness". Even dogs, crows get upset, if treated unfairly. There are experiments where giving desired treats, unfairly, causes these animals(monkeys too), to exhibit outrage. EG, giving some to one animal, and less desirable treats to another. Bartering is an offshoot of "being fair". I "worked" to make this thing, but now I need a thing you have. You worked for it. Each of us spent time, effort, work, but how much, who spent more? We negotiate. We settle. This is bartering. And at the root of this, is fairness. And even animals, inherently, know this.
      - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        Right. Tax, whether to a government, or to an employer, is the beginnings of unfairness. Taxes can be used for fairness (enforced savings for everyone for the winter), and as a form of barter (military protection), but the value gained by singular authorities makes things disproportionately unfair. I guess maybe the taxation is not the problem, it's the centralization of the taxed wealth to particular figures in the government (nobles) or corporations (shareholders and executives).
      - 4y ago
bratwurst3000 4y ago
I think doing journalism part time for free is how bellingcat started.
indigochill 4y ago
> And since people need money to live, the people making that stuff need money. Yes, but I believe advertising is a poor solution for that. Because it seems to tend to lead to optimizing for advertising at the expense of quality. I believe crowdfunding is a better solution for a couple reasons. 1. Enough people want the thing to be made to be willing to front the cost for it (contrast this with advertising-funded journalism, much of which is just a constant barrage of noise rather than it all being something someone's passionate enough about making to pitch). 2. Over time, creators develop reputations for good or ill, and this enables trustworthy creators to start to bank on their reputation for future, perhaps riskier projects, while making it harder for untrustworthy creators to continue practicing. 3. Related to point 2, over time this optimizes for delivery of quality output (which is the most important way this is better than advertising, IMO). It does require quality pitches as well to convince people to front the money for the effort, but if you deliver a quality pitch and bail on the output, your reputation takes a nosedive.
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  Crowd funding is a complete failure. Look at any high quality project or content used by hundreds of thousands and they will have a dozen people donating if any. Charging for content access is the only way, freeloaders can be left behind.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    > Charging for content access is the only way, freeloaders can be left behind. Newspaper publishers were slow to pick up on the free www. Until they did, all we needed was a dialup connection, and we could go anywhere, serve anything, and talk to anyone. I'm not sure what broke the dam, but it might have been when browsers started behaving according to some kind of documented standard. Then adblockers came, and the publishers started pushing nag modals. Then publishers decided to try to run ads as well as paywalls; yeah, suckers, pay us to watch our ads! I regret the passing of an internet that was free to use, give or take a connection. They did steal it.
    - 4y ago
rchaud 4y ago
> There is a lot of stuff that just doesn't happen unless somebody is working on it full-time. And since people need money to live, the people making that stuff need money. I definitely agree. And even for people doing it solo as a full-time job (email newsletters come to mind), the quality tends to be less than what would be possible if they had even one other person sharing the work.

jhoechtl 4y ago

Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning) There are studies where money ruins altruism and pure joy of creating sthg. has to be replaced with a payment which becomes according to Herzberg a hygiene factor and wears out. The --internet-- www as we know it - give it back!

chii 4y ago
> Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning) but it eventually had paid sponsorships from companies that make money off it.
linsomniac 4y ago
Linux is a VERY different thing than investigative journalism. I can't think of a single bit of investigative journalism someone did as a side project that has spawned an entire industry, but maybe I'm not thinking hard enough. Content costs money to make. Yes, sometimes give via self-funding of the content (without advertisement, like by working a job), and that's fantastic. But we also need a way to support the content that we like, and we can't expect everyone to be able to give.
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  > Content costs money to make Some content costs money, other content - and how I dislike the word 'content' which turns that which makes the 'net interesting inside-out to make it into a money-making scheme - costs time to make. Not all time is money, lots of it is time spent on activities which people do without the need for payment since they enjoy it. Call it a 'hobby' or 'pastime' if you want, something to do when you're free to do what you want. Some people like to go and watch sports games, others like to sit on the sofa and watch televised drivel while others park themselves in front of a computer to create something. Much of what is created is interesting only to the creator for the act of creation but some of it has value beyond the experience of the creator. That is indeed how the Linux kernel got started, it is how a lot of music is made, artwork is created and more.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  > I can't think of a single bit of investigative journalism someone did as a side project that has spawned an entire industry Maybe not an entire industry, but Bellingcat has been impactful and it started with a guy commenting on the guardian comments section.
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  Investigative journalism, (the media), sometimes referred to as "The Fourth Estate", is too important to be funded by advertising, and should be funded by the people, and be for the people. Just like the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of our governments.
paulryanrogers 4y ago
Survivorship bias?
marcinzm 4y ago
>Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning) Red Hat started in 1993 and SUSE in 1994. So you got 2 whole years before money entered the picture.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- b112 4y ago
  In the early years, these companies were tiny, struggled to not go out of business. And because they were so small, they contributed very little paid time... anywhere. Linux happened for free.
  - fauigerzigerk 4y ago
    Yes, Linux was started for free as a student project, but the reason why it became the standard choice for data centers is because large corporations like Oracle, IBM and later Google united behind it in order to stop Microsoft from dominating servers. These corporations along with some commercial distributions have been funding Linux development for decades. Linux as we know it today is a child of corporate strategic thinking.
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      IBM, DEC, Sun, HP and others already had commercial Unix offerings with support that corporate users wanted for servers. Why unite behind Linux, which at the time was inferior to all those others?
      - mixmastamyk 4y ago
        To attack Windows from the top and bottom simultaneously. It may seem excessive but MS was in a very strong position at the time. Many of us wondered if anything else would survive.
- tokai 4y ago
  I'm not against Red Hat but the sentiment that they are ruining Linux is not that uncommon.
strogonoff 4y ago
I believe “you create for free and live poor” vs. “you need to monetize your work via ads” is definitely the wrong dichotomy. You can simply create out of inspiration, while having a job that pays your bills (that is actually how a lot of OSS happened). Or you could publish some work openly, while suggesting the reader to buy your book, for example. Over-reliance on ad-based model and the resulting prevalence of double-sided “social” platforms where the advertiser is the customer, actual user needs count for nothing because no one will leave and no honest competitor can compete with “free”, most certainly seems to me to be at the root of a lot of dysfunction—if these platforms make more money from engagement thanks to aggravating inflammatory posts, regardless of whether they are well informed or in good faith, then that’s what they will promote and reward one way or another. The expectation of “free” is part of the problem, sure, but I don’t think that’s the cause. The cause can probably be distilled to “abuse of information asymmetry in free market enabled by regulatory inaction” (free market is great, but in presence of malicious actors it needs some regulation or it stops working). That leads to the aforementioned platforms, then the expectation of “free” and non-appreciation of work published completely for free just out of altruism or to feel pride/recognition, and generally goes counter to how the market is supposed to work.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  It's primarily a cultural difference. In print media ads were fairly tame. They weren't personally targeted and in some contexts they were quite welcome. Although print magazines made most of their money by selling ad pages, the content was largely firewalled. (Byte is a good example. The content was always hacker culture not ad culture.) On the internet, ad culture - not just ads themselves - has consumed everything. Whether it's a YouTube channel owner reminding everyone to like-and-subscribe, or some TikTok nonsense desperately trying to go viral, it's mostly about reach - defined entirely by potential ad spend - and not about the content, which is almost incidental to monetisation. And that's why it's so noisy, and often trivial. In fact I suspect there's a general Gresham's Law principle of cultural systems. As access and delivery become cheaper, content becomes noisier, more trivial, and less culturally valuable. As we go from manual content generation to automated AI content reach will increase, but cultural value - in the sense of challenging, original ideas and experiences that have lasting widespread relevance - will decrease even further.
unity1001 4y ago
> Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning) Linux happened mostly through the contributions of the paid developers of the Linux foundation. And still the majority of the commits belong to those developers. And it was possible to do so because the foundation received enough support from major donors, most of which were corporations. If you would want to choose an Open Source success story that wasnt backed by corporations, WordPress would be what you are looking for. But even then, the WordPress ecosystem found a way to fund itself directly through its users. Which means that they are also funded. In contrast, a gigantic amount of Open Source projects were abandoned when its contributors were no longer able to maintain them because life responsibilities started raining on them... Unfortunately any social paradigm, movement or setup must be able to sustain itself economically. The best way to do it is to do it through its users, directly, so that concentrated capital wont be able to take it over.
rchaud 4y ago
Linux is the exception that proves the rule. While it is completely free (beer + libre), Google and Facebook exploited numerous Linux-related technologies to turn the internet into a planet-scale ad machine.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  I apologise for my pedantry, but: > the exception that proves the rule To prove the rule is to test the rule; proof spirit is spirit that passes the test, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The exception that proves the rule is the exception that violates it (and shows that the rule is a heuristic, not a law).

waboremo 4y ago

>And since people need money to live And now we're getting to the actual root of the problem.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
If you make it so people don't need money to live, they'll invent a new currency. People are hardwired to barter.
- waboremo 4y ago
  That's not even remotely true. Nothing about us is inherent to bartering. That's of course relying on the assumption that we would get rid of money entirely as the only solution.
  - b112 4y ago
    Bartering is an offshoot of "fairness". Even dogs, crows get upset, if treated unfairly. There are experiments where giving desired treats, unfairly, causes these animals(monkeys too), to exhibit outrage. EG, giving some to one animal, and less desirable treats to another. Bartering is an offshoot of "being fair". I "worked" to make this thing, but now I need a thing you have. You worked for it. Each of us spent time, effort, work, but how much, who spent more? We negotiate. We settle. This is bartering. And at the root of this, is fairness. And even animals, inherently, know this.
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      Right. Tax, whether to a government, or to an employer, is the beginnings of unfairness. Taxes can be used for fairness (enforced savings for everyone for the winter), and as a form of barter (military protection), but the value gained by singular authorities makes things disproportionately unfair. I guess maybe the taxation is not the problem, it's the centralization of the taxed wealth to particular figures in the government (nobles) or corporations (shareholders and executives).
    - 4y ago

bratwurst3000 4y ago

I think doing journalism part time for free is how bellingcat started.

indigochill 4y ago

> And since people need money to live, the people making that stuff need money. Yes, but I believe advertising is a poor solution for that. Because it seems to tend to lead to optimizing for advertising at the expense of quality. I believe crowdfunding is a better solution for a couple reasons. 1. Enough people want the thing to be made to be willing to front the cost for it (contrast this with advertising-funded journalism, much of which is just a constant barrage of noise rather than it all being something someone's passionate enough about making to pitch). 2. Over time, creators develop reputations for good or ill, and this enables trustworthy creators to start to bank on their reputation for future, perhaps riskier projects, while making it harder for untrustworthy creators to continue practicing. 3. Related to point 2, over time this optimizes for delivery of quality output (which is the most important way this is better than advertising, IMO). It does require quality pitches as well to convince people to front the money for the effort, but if you deliver a quality pitch and bail on the output, your reputation takes a nosedive.

carlosjobim 4y ago
Crowd funding is a complete failure. Look at any high quality project or content used by hundreds of thousands and they will have a dozen people donating if any. Charging for content access is the only way, freeloaders can be left behind.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > Charging for content access is the only way, freeloaders can be left behind. Newspaper publishers were slow to pick up on the free www. Until they did, all we needed was a dialup connection, and we could go anywhere, serve anything, and talk to anyone. I'm not sure what broke the dam, but it might have been when browsers started behaving according to some kind of documented standard. Then adblockers came, and the publishers started pushing nag modals. Then publishers decided to try to run ads as well as paywalls; yeah, suckers, pay us to watch our ads! I regret the passing of an internet that was free to use, give or take a connection. They did steal it.
  - 4y ago

rchaud 4y ago

> There is a lot of stuff that just doesn't happen unless somebody is working on it full-time. And since people need money to live, the people making that stuff need money. I definitely agree. And even for people doing it solo as a full-time job (email newsletters come to mind), the quality tends to be less than what would be possible if they had even one other person sharing the work.