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I'm not a big believer in this. It simply doesn't scale. So I might donate chunks of income to 1, 2, maybe 5 or 10 people like this. What about everyone else? I

I'm not a big believer in this. It simply doesn't scale. So I might donate chunks of income to 1, 2, maybe 5 or 10 people like this. What about everyone else? It's not a fair system. I engage with lots of youtube channels, read lots of things on dozens/hundreds of websites. Add a few podcasts to the mix and it starts adding up to quite a lot of mouths to feed with individual donations. It's not reasonable for all of them to expect something from me. At least with Spotify and Netflix there is some kind of rev share thing in place. It's not very fair of course and a bit biased towards rewarding content creators that I don't necessarily like (or are in need of more money). But it's better than having to cherry pick creators. Somehow publishers have resisted creating such a thing for written media. We have this broken model of ad supported media and media outlets taking most of that revenue and paying really shitty wages to journalists, many of whom are working on a freelance basis and get paid pitiful amounts per word. Why do we have all these middlemen?

ulrikrasmussen 2y ago
Spotify doesn't solve that problem at all, it just helps you avoid feeling bad about it. I know artists who sell their music on both Bandcamp and on Spotify, and they all say that their income from Spotify is utterly insignificant unless you are already a big and established name with lots and lots of streams. You are not the only one consuming a given podcast or YouTube channel, and even if you don't subscribe to their Patreon, maybe someone who likes it even more will. Sure, some content creators will not get enough income to continue, but is that really a big problem? We have no shortage of musicians, blog authors and podcasters, and if you don't care enough about a podcast to give a little bit of money to it, then maybe you won't miss it that much if it disappears. Advocating for a different market structure than the ad-tech fueled one will of course change the supply side and I am not claiming otherwise. I just don't think it's necessarily going to be a problem, on the contrary it will optimize for content that people love rather than content that just stimulates them.
aunty_helen 2y ago
Paying 1 is better than 0. You’re assuming support has to scale perfectly to be fair, but that’s a false binary. Creators don’t expect everyone to pay but they rely on _someone_ paying. Refusing because it ‘doesn’t scale’ just reinforces a broken system where nobody pays, creators lose and we end up with the shit quality media and content we have now
- sbarre 2y ago
  > we end up with the shit quality media and content we have now I'll just say that looking back on my life consuming media (that started long before the consumer Internet was around), there has never been a better selection of media that I enjoy than now. I've never watched reality shows or sitcoms, the kind of stuff that dominated mass media for a long time... I have interests that don't necessarily fall into the mainstream, so finding interesting or quality content was hard, and shows/films/docs were few and far between.. But now? The current system, while imperfect, at least allows for every possible topic and niche to be somewhat sustainable. The sheer quantity of media has absolutely grown exponentially so there's definitely a lot more bad media, and media that isn't for me, but in terms of choice for myself, it's incredibly good. Obviously YMMV and this is just my anecdotal experience, but I don't consider the system to be broken (even though, again, it's certainly not perfect).

ulrikrasmussen 2y ago

Spotify doesn't solve that problem at all, it just helps you avoid feeling bad about it. I know artists who sell their music on both Bandcamp and on Spotify, and they all say that their income from Spotify is utterly insignificant unless you are already a big and established name with lots and lots of streams. You are not the only one consuming a given podcast or YouTube channel, and even if you don't subscribe to their Patreon, maybe someone who likes it even more will. Sure, some content creators will not get enough income to continue, but is that really a big problem? We have no shortage of musicians, blog authors and podcasters, and if you don't care enough about a podcast to give a little bit of money to it, then maybe you won't miss it that much if it disappears. Advocating for a different market structure than the ad-tech fueled one will of course change the supply side and I am not claiming otherwise. I just don't think it's necessarily going to be a problem, on the contrary it will optimize for content that people love rather than content that just stimulates them.

aunty_helen 2y ago

Paying 1 is better than 0. You’re assuming support has to scale perfectly to be fair, but that’s a false binary. Creators don’t expect everyone to pay but they rely on _someone_ paying. Refusing because it ‘doesn’t scale’ just reinforces a broken system where nobody pays, creators lose and we end up with the shit quality media and content we have now

sbarre 2y ago
> we end up with the shit quality media and content we have now I'll just say that looking back on my life consuming media (that started long before the consumer Internet was around), there has never been a better selection of media that I enjoy than now. I've never watched reality shows or sitcoms, the kind of stuff that dominated mass media for a long time... I have interests that don't necessarily fall into the mainstream, so finding interesting or quality content was hard, and shows/films/docs were few and far between.. But now? The current system, while imperfect, at least allows for every possible topic and niche to be somewhat sustainable. The sheer quantity of media has absolutely grown exponentially so there's definitely a lot more bad media, and media that isn't for me, but in terms of choice for myself, it's incredibly good. Obviously YMMV and this is just my anecdotal experience, but I don't consider the system to be broken (even though, again, it's certainly not perfect).