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> 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

> 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.
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    I regret the passing of an internet that was free to use, give or take a connection. They did steal it. That's when I fell in love with the potential of the www/internet and switched career paths. But in hindsight that was never really going to last. When the guts of the public www (browsers, servers, data pipes, protocols, TCP/IP support in operating systems) were being built out in the 90s, it was all predicated on the belief that it was the future of commerce. Without that explosion, "the free internet" probably would have just been a slightly evolved version of the dial-up BBS scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Which is cool, and honestly depending on my mood I might be willing to trade 2023's technology hellscape for that simpler time.

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.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  I regret the passing of an internet that was free to use, give or take a connection. They did steal it. That's when I fell in love with the potential of the www/internet and switched career paths. But in hindsight that was never really going to last. When the guts of the public www (browsers, servers, data pipes, protocols, TCP/IP support in operating systems) were being built out in the 90s, it was all predicated on the belief that it was the future of commerce. Without that explosion, "the free internet" probably would have just been a slightly evolved version of the dial-up BBS scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Which is cool, and honestly depending on my mood I might be willing to trade 2023's technology hellscape for that simpler time.