Well, for many publishers the choice is either ads or paywalls. The fact that people feel entitled to get everything for free is a part of why things are going to shit, because ads bring with them a whole slew of perverse incentives (eg. optimizing for ad views instead of content quality)
The paywalls restrict the flow of quality information, which happened before LLMs started scraping the web. If you don’t have money to spend on all of these news subscriptions you aren’t allowed to educate yourself. It’s class-based gatekeeping, plain and simple. They could tactfully include ads, but no one ever tactfully includes ads. They introduce pop-ups, fullscreen banners, interjections every 25 words, or the best is the articles that are just slide shows that take you through 30+ webpages.
Edit: I’d also like to point out that this article already has an ad at the beginning. So they are still making ad revenue even if they aren’t giving you complete access.
They could tactfully include ads, but no one ever tactfully includes ads.
Because they don’t work outside of basically podcasting. And even then many shows stretch “tactfully.”
Additionally, over 60% of American internet users use an adblocker. The Atlantic as a US publication relies heavily on US citizens. They didn’t create that situation, but they have to experience the ramifications.
So “tactful” ads are not an option. You don’t want obtrusive ads that unfortunately are the only ones that vaguely work. You don’t want to pay for it directly. If they went government funded or something it would be used as a cudgel against them forever (look at how NPR gets shit on it randomly, which basically gets a fraction of its funding from government grants and not even formally from the US budget). So functionally no ads, no selling, no subscriptions, no government funding.
This is pretty patently hyperbole; I’ve run into many sites, including news, with non-intrusive ads.
Whether it’s class-based gatekeeping is another matter entirely. For-profit media employees have to eat too, and in the current economic system most can’t just give people access to content for free without any sort of monetization mechanism and with a voluntary subscription, because that’ll very often lead to income dropping off a cliff. Unfortunately people are very loath to pay for online services except for some more niche cases like the Fediverse where instances run on voluntary donations – although I’ve seen a couple of moderately popular instances struggling with upkeep being higher than what people are willing to donate (and it’s not just services either; open source developers face similar issues.) In some countries we at least have public broadcasting companies, although eg. here in Finland the current extremist right-wing government is looking to reduce its funding by quite a bit and possibly even entirely dismantle it if they get their way.
While I definitely agree that news should be available for free, railing against a for-profit publisher’s paywall is, frankly, myopic; like it or not, in the current system even content producers have to make a living. None of us really has a choice in whether we want to live in this system or not
Advertising, by design, is intrusive. It’s fighting for space in your mind whether you want it to be there or not. We can shelve that topic because it’s a side item here.
The difference between making a big deal of nothing and being completely on-topic is that the article itself goes into the responsibilities of publishers and platforms, how they have a responsibility to make the internet a better connected, more human-friendly place. You don’t see massive sources of misinformation locking down their content, but you will definitely see potentially credible sources of information doing that. It’s counter to the premise of the article entirely.
I don’t believe it’s myopic at all to point out that it’s backwards to expect the internet to thrive when quality information isn’t readily available. Sure you can use a different search engine, seek out free content and resources, all of which require an in-depth dive to find anything worthwhile.
The topic of this post is why the internet is dying, and while I recognize people need to make money to eat I think these news media sites are more than capable of providing for their employees with or without a paywall. Megacorps like Google, Meta, and Microsoft having control over what gets the most clicks is definitely contributing to rapid enshittification. Especially when they’re sending most traffic to articles that either have a paywall or a steady feed of bullshit.
The question is how do you expect quality information to be produced if it isn’t paid for? I think it’s terrible we have to think in those terms but as the other person said, that is reality.
Linux is a prime example of quality that isn’t paid for. No one forces you to pay for Linux, you can of course support the maintainers and donate, but it’s not a for-profit endeavor.
Linux is the result of a massive number of people working at their own paces with no deadlines and no expenses other than time and the computer they already own, as well as foundations where people get paid and pay others do tasks. Lots of private companies are also involved, and they exist because of profits.
Quality, relevant journalism has hard costs associated with it and has to move very fast. I’m not even talking about the twitter blitz that leads to sloppiness. I’m saying any and all breaking news. How do you plan on getting any on the ground reporting in Gaza?
What you are suggesting would mean that only those who don’t need an income can participate in the endeavor. Which unfortunately is also the case with Linux - big contributors have to stop all the time, projects die regularly, because “life gets in the way.” It just shifts the problem.
Open source programming and journalism have some parallels I’m sure but this comparison just doesn’t work on many levels.
How do you propose these “open source journalists” make a living? Corporate grants or straight-up corporate jobs just like a huge chunk of Linux development, landing us right back at square one, if not even somewhat behind it? At least independent media exists nowadays, but if the assumption is that all news has to be freely available, like acastcandream said that’d just lead to journalism being very effectively locked out as a career path for anyone who’s not independently wealthy or somehow able to make people actually donate or pay for a subscription despite the content being available for free – and that hasn’t worked out too well for most publishers so far.
The largest code contributors to Linux are corporate contributions
Regular people who contribute to OSS do so as a passion project, as a hobby, and have other unrelated jobs that pay the bills. Those people still have to make a living, they’re just not doing it from their software contributions. Journalism isn’t a hobby and you can’t work a day job and still be an effective journalist. News orgs don’t come together as hobby projects.
I’m not defending advertising. I hate it and think it’s ruined the web. I’m just addressing the analogy here wrt Linux.
Well, for many publishers the choice is either ads or paywalls. The fact that people feel entitled to get everything for free is a part of why things are going to shit, because ads bring with them a whole slew of perverse incentives (eg. optimizing for ad views instead of content quality)
The paywalls restrict the flow of quality information, which happened before LLMs started scraping the web. If you don’t have money to spend on all of these news subscriptions you aren’t allowed to educate yourself. It’s class-based gatekeeping, plain and simple. They could tactfully include ads, but no one ever tactfully includes ads. They introduce pop-ups, fullscreen banners, interjections every 25 words, or the best is the articles that are just slide shows that take you through 30+ webpages.
Edit: I’d also like to point out that this article already has an ad at the beginning. So they are still making ad revenue even if they aren’t giving you complete access.
Because they don’t work outside of basically podcasting. And even then many shows stretch “tactfully.”
Additionally, over 60% of American internet users use an adblocker. The Atlantic as a US publication relies heavily on US citizens. They didn’t create that situation, but they have to experience the ramifications.
So “tactful” ads are not an option. You don’t want obtrusive ads that unfortunately are the only ones that vaguely work. You don’t want to pay for it directly. If they went government funded or something it would be used as a cudgel against them forever (look at how NPR gets shit on it randomly, which basically gets a fraction of its funding from government grants and not even formally from the US budget). So functionally no ads, no selling, no subscriptions, no government funding.
They need to eat. What should they do?
This is pretty patently hyperbole; I’ve run into many sites, including news, with non-intrusive ads.
Whether it’s class-based gatekeeping is another matter entirely. For-profit media employees have to eat too, and in the current economic system most can’t just give people access to content for free without any sort of monetization mechanism and with a voluntary subscription, because that’ll very often lead to income dropping off a cliff. Unfortunately people are very loath to pay for online services except for some more niche cases like the Fediverse where instances run on voluntary donations – although I’ve seen a couple of moderately popular instances struggling with upkeep being higher than what people are willing to donate (and it’s not just services either; open source developers face similar issues.) In some countries we at least have public broadcasting companies, although eg. here in Finland the current extremist right-wing government is looking to reduce its funding by quite a bit and possibly even entirely dismantle it if they get their way.
While I definitely agree that news should be available for free, railing against a for-profit publisher’s paywall is, frankly, myopic; like it or not, in the current system even content producers have to make a living. None of us really has a choice in whether we want to live in this system or not
Advertising, by design, is intrusive. It’s fighting for space in your mind whether you want it to be there or not. We can shelve that topic because it’s a side item here.
The difference between making a big deal of nothing and being completely on-topic is that the article itself goes into the responsibilities of publishers and platforms, how they have a responsibility to make the internet a better connected, more human-friendly place. You don’t see massive sources of misinformation locking down their content, but you will definitely see potentially credible sources of information doing that. It’s counter to the premise of the article entirely.
I don’t believe it’s myopic at all to point out that it’s backwards to expect the internet to thrive when quality information isn’t readily available. Sure you can use a different search engine, seek out free content and resources, all of which require an in-depth dive to find anything worthwhile.
The topic of this post is why the internet is dying, and while I recognize people need to make money to eat I think these news media sites are more than capable of providing for their employees with or without a paywall. Megacorps like Google, Meta, and Microsoft having control over what gets the most clicks is definitely contributing to rapid enshittification. Especially when they’re sending most traffic to articles that either have a paywall or a steady feed of bullshit.
The question is how do you expect quality information to be produced if it isn’t paid for? I think it’s terrible we have to think in those terms but as the other person said, that is reality.
Linux is a prime example of quality that isn’t paid for. No one forces you to pay for Linux, you can of course support the maintainers and donate, but it’s not a for-profit endeavor.
Linux is the result of a massive number of people working at their own paces with no deadlines and no expenses other than time and the computer they already own, as well as foundations where people get paid and pay others do tasks. Lots of private companies are also involved, and they exist because of profits.
Quality, relevant journalism has hard costs associated with it and has to move very fast. I’m not even talking about the twitter blitz that leads to sloppiness. I’m saying any and all breaking news. How do you plan on getting any on the ground reporting in Gaza?
What you are suggesting would mean that only those who don’t need an income can participate in the endeavor. Which unfortunately is also the case with Linux - big contributors have to stop all the time, projects die regularly, because “life gets in the way.” It just shifts the problem.
Open source programming and journalism have some parallels I’m sure but this comparison just doesn’t work on many levels.
How do you propose these “open source journalists” make a living? Corporate grants or straight-up corporate jobs just like a huge chunk of Linux development, landing us right back at square one, if not even somewhat behind it? At least independent media exists nowadays, but if the assumption is that all news has to be freely available, like acastcandream said that’d just lead to journalism being very effectively locked out as a career path for anyone who’s not independently wealthy or somehow able to make people actually donate or pay for a subscription despite the content being available for free – and that hasn’t worked out too well for most publishers so far.
I’m not defending advertising. I hate it and think it’s ruined the web. I’m just addressing the analogy here wrt Linux.