I think they acknowledged this in the last couple sentences. The article is talking less about what is good or bad reporting, and more about what is a sustainable financial model for good reporting.
>The bulk of my friends don’t pay for subscriptions. The bulk of the internet doesn’t pay for subscriptions. People will gladly spend hours a day reading brainjunk, to avoid even the slightest expense that might improve the quality of what they are reading.
There are non-subscription models, e.g. people pay for ebooks.
There are niche subscriptions, e.g. finance, health, which cost much more than Netflix.
Some websites have occasional article gems, but there's no way to pay for a high quality, non-DRM, indexable, offline readable, surveillance-free PDF/A version.
> There are non-subscription models, e.g. people pay for ebooks.
Another nice example is Blendle.
While there exist good reasons to pay for quality journalism there's no reason why I should pay a monthly subscription to every news outlet I ever want to read anything from.
[...] if you actually want to learn, to improve your mind, to improve your awareness and understanding of the world, you have to shell out.”
The “paid” part seems awfully arbitrary. I went to a great exhibit the other night, where I got to see wonderful photography, for free. I just read a great biology paper published for free by the Royal Society on my way to work. And I am now listening to a fascinating NPR podcast, also downloaded for free.
I guess my taxes paid for all of those in some way (even though I only lived in the UK for a year, so that was a meager contribution to the Royal Society’s coffers), but I wouldn’t say I “shelled out” for all these things.
On a thread about a week ago another commenter also pointed out that some of the best content on the web is in (free) sites maintained by hobbyists, on some specialized topic or other, and that this content is more often than not difficult to find because it doesn't SEO well.
(Which should be a strong indicator that Google's SEO algorithm is wildly broken from a user's point of view. But at this point, Google, the de-facto search and web advertisement monopoly, has no incentive to prioritize quality content, and every incentive to prioritize content that brings them ad revenue. Which garbage content, presented poorly, is great at doing.)
Well, not that I don't believe that there is a lot of good, free content out there - on the web and off - I have found that, when I want to learn a new technology like Git, or Scala, or Angular, the $30 or so I spend on an O'Reilly book is well worth the time I save plodding through incomplete blog posts or sparsely maintained documentation pages.
You've just hit on what's almost certainly the answer: tax-financed content.
Information is a public good. It should be financed as public goods are: via taxes, based on ability to pay (e.g., progressive taxation).
"At the Graduate Center, we believe knowledge is a public good. This idea inspires our research, teaching, and public events. We invite you to join us for timely discussions, diverse cultural perspectives, and thought-provoking ideas."
Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325.
I wonder, where does this assertion come from, that "readers crave brainjunk at the expense of all other quality content"? The surrounding sentences suggest that the author genuinely believes that demand came (and comes) first, and "media companies have been more than happy to oblige". I posit that this is a load of crock.
Free "junky" content is popular simply because it's free and plentiful, and has a vastly, unquantifiably lower barrier to entry than paid content -- and not because it's dopamine-releasing junk. It's popular because it's accessible, requires little cognitive load to evaluate ahead of time, and its momentary consumption is noncommittal. If article mills stopped producing throwaway clickbait to fill an Outbrain footer, the corresponding "demand" would plummet.
But this content keeps being produced, because business models on the web suck, so every publisher feels they have to put some eggs into advertising. Because reader attention has an upper bound, one publisher's gain is quite often another's loss, and this directly translates into advertising revenue.
Given the low appetite for the masses to pay, Apple, Google, Facebook, Medium, and incumbent news publications have all tried to solve this problem in ways that further integrate advertising, analytics, and personalized suggestions, and these efforts continue to face challenges due to the misalignment of incentives.
YouTube Red is a nice exception. For $10 per month, I get no ads, and some portion of my fee goes to the creators of the videos I watch. I've already taken the time to subscribe to certain creators, so now my YouTube feed is high quality with little noise. If Google revealed exactly how much of my subscription is going to creators, I think it would be easier to convince more people to sign up. I'd like to see other services try a similar model.
A lot, most even, of the channels I subscribe to do not even care about YouTube monetization any more. They get most of their operating revenue from outside sources like Patreon, merchandise sales, affiliate linking to e-commerce sites, etc. The general consenus seems to be, in a nutshell: It's just not worth it -- YouTube/Google's algorithmic approach to monetization and what is and what's not "advertiser friendly" (whatever the hell that means, I don't think Google themselves know at this point) is an absolute schooolbus fire. Also how they handle "strikes" is a hot, hot mess. Google can pull the rug out from under you overnight on a whim for quite literally no good reason and there's nothing you can do about it because there's no one to call, e-mail, or talk to unless you're one of the big channels that have millions and millions of subscribers.
I get that the scale of YouTube is far too big to do it by human hands & eyes, but the approach they're taking currently is flat out failing.
>The general consenus seems to be, in a nutshell: It's just not worth it
It probably isn't for the creators I follow, and I try to put a few bucks of coffee money into patreon like collections for them.
The value for youtube red is in time saved and advertisement avoided for the user. Then again never being interrupted by advertisements I don't go looking for is a personal eccentricity so it's a time money trade-off. How many minutes of video commercials avoided a month is worth $10?
The Gutenberg Project had free e-books decades ago, but people did not and do not devour Beowulf the same way they do an Instagram feed, even though Beowulf is even easier and cheaper to access.
Great point. And another
example: I would much rather mindlessly browse Reddit or HN on the toilet or in between tasks at work, than to commit my attention to a classic like Beowulf at those times.
Most people couldn’t even read Beowulf if you gave it to them.
Wæs se grimma gæst Grendel haten,
mære mearcstapa, se þe moras heold,
fen ond fæsten; fifelcynnes eard
wonsæli wer weardode hwile,
siþðan him scyppend forscrifen hæfde
in Caines cynne.
Many people struggle to read their own language sadly, or comprehend stories with any amount of depth. Old English is probably asking too much of them.
I’m not convinced that this is new though, we’re just far more connected to the LCD than ever before.
Edit: Translation of excerpt:
Grendel this monster grim was called,
march-riever mighty, in moorland living,
in fen and fastness; fief of the giants
the hapless wight a while had kept
since the Creator his exile doomed.
On kin of Cain was the killing avenged...
Yes, I remembered that and included the translation, but I’d say that my overall point stands. How many people would find the translation overly accessible unless they were already of a literary bent, or just well educated?
It's an epic about a king traveling and killing a dragon, it doesn't take a ton of education to enjoy. And beyond that, there are many books on there that are accessible for anyone who can read. Your overall point seems fine, but it agrees with the person you replied to that cheap and easy to get isn't what's driving this.
> It's an epic about a king traveling and killing a dragon, it doesn't take a ton of education to enjoy.
That is an extremely simplistic look at literature - you just reduced it to one sentence description of plot alone. That is not how it works and that is not how it ever worked. What makes it hard is the way it is written, presence of either dragon or killing does not make something easier to read. He is right in that most people would not enjoy it.
> And beyond that, there are many books on there that are accessible for anyone who can read.
And many many more that are decisively not accessible. You assume that people will dig for hours through guttenberg to find something fun and accessible, but they wont and probably cant.
>That is an extremely simplistic look at literature - you just reduced it to one sentence description of plot alone. That is not how it works and that is not how it ever worked.
There's more in the text than just the plot, but the story alone can be enjoyable without knowing everything else. I'll agree the old translation of an ancient poem is probably still going to be a chore, a better example is something like Dracula.
>And many many more that are decisively not accessible. You assume that people will dig for hours through guttenberg to find something fun and accessible, but they wont and probably cant.
No, I assume that people will find something fun and accessible by the same means they do elsewhere, either through talking to other people or looking at what's popular.
You’re giving me the strong impression of someone who is very bright, and has spent most of their time around other very bright people in the context of an excellent education. You should be proud of that, while recognizing how many more people live profoundly different lives. Consider the popularity of entertainment you’d find offensively boring, and remember that far more people enjoy that, than Beowulf.
In short, what you’re saying isn’t wrong or unreasonable, but I think it’s fair to say that it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what “average” looks like.
Popular entertainment isn't a new phenomenon, there are plenty of books on Project Gutenberg that anyone could find enjoyable without needing some deep understanding of literature.
And remember what's being discussed here. You can't blame "brainjunk" on people unwilling to pay for content, as they are also ignoring the free content on Project Gutenberg.
Popular entertainment of 19 century is often not fun for someone living in 21 century. The reasons why it was fun to people went away with changing society.
So, as someone who attempted to read Dracula - Dracula is boring and nothing whatsover happens till half of the novel or so. Which is approximately where I stopped reading.
Also, if you have hard time to interpret the story, because the sentences are oddly written and unnatural and characters talk the way real people now don't talk, you wont have no fun no matter how many dragons.
> No, I assume that people will find something fun and accessible by the same means they do elsewhere, either through talking to other people or looking at what's popular.
On Guttenberg? That brain junk stuff goes out of their way to reach you. It is completely different model. That is not criticism of Guttenberg, their mission is to preserve and they do it well.
Eh, I got hooked on it pretty fast. Plenty of other examples though.
>On Guttenberg? That brain junk stuff goes out of their way to reach you. It is completely different model.
Yeah, this is the point. Project Gutenberg isn't ignored now because you need decades of education to possibly enjoy it, brainjunk is crafted to be addictive.
No, it is completely different point. Gutenberg puts zero work into helping you to find something you might like. It just is not their thing.
And the education is necessary to be able to figure out which few books on Guttenberg might be interesting to you. Because overwhelming majority of them is not interesting to you or anyone except few specialists on something.
And majority of that could not possibly replace the kind of reading you do when you relax for 6 minutes between one task and another task at work.
They have the most downloaded page, all the categories, maintain copies of "Best Books" lists with links to available books, and a page with the top bestsellers for most years available. Hardly zero help, no education required.
People read in those situations, but that is a different argument altogether.
Most downloaded page contains basically mandatory reading for students. Who I guess use Guttenberg to download books to read as homework. Then there are few popular things most people already read (like Sherlock Holmes) and there you end.
It is great place for study, good place if you actually are into some historical period and not much of a place if you are contemporary person and just wanna have some fun. No, majority of those most popular books are not fun for most people.
OK? I'm not saying people should be using the platform, I clearly spend my free time on other things. It shows this issue can't be blamed on price, as there is free, easily accessible quality content available. People could read those books and find them enjoyable, that's why many of them are taught by schools or considered great.
It is a choice each one will make for oneself. I e.g. made the choice to selectively read things, drop out completely from social media, buzzfeed (and the sort) and rely on proper journalism. I am 100% with Danny on this one.
Of course (freedom of choice) one may select the Kardashians (and unfortunately not the Star Trek ones) over poetry. I want them to select what they feel like consuming, and I want me to have the same choice. The problem is with many outlets switching to 'junkfood', the few that may remain become hostage to money-hungry shareholders and thus the game is slowly being lost.
If you define good book as "a book I will enjoy to read", then finding good book on Gutengerg is quite hard. You need to know either author or book name. Finding those takes quite a lot of effort. Otherwise you will be downloading things that have no interest to you - and end up on instagram.
Is junky free content really more popular in the grand scheme of things or just the most popular content on the web?
The only thing that creeps up on TV consumption in the US is social media use. Billions of books containing hundreds of pages each are sold in the US each year and presumably some large fraction of those are read.
Hundreds of millions of magazine subscriptions are sold in the US, mostly of monthlies.
The metrics used to measure online success are just sort of muddled. Imagine if we evaluated magazines by how many pages were turned. You would get some very silly magazines very quickly.
Instead magazines are evaluated by the demographics of their subscribers, prestige as judged by things like prizes, and the scale of the subscriber base.
Unlike websites which just model demographics and are usually not audited, magazines can have their subscriber lists audited and are mostly not modeled. Same thing with cable TV/Netflix/other paid services. The demographics don't really have to be modeled because you have every person's name and address. Each individual or household has to pay so you know they're individuals that exist and not bots.
I think one issue with the way media companies have evaluated 'social media' is that they considered it to be another form of professional media. Really what it replaces are phone calls, mail, and in-person chatter or photo album sharing. It does not and has not really replaced traditional media consumption.
This is a terrible article. It leads with social commentary about supposed healthy amounts of content, and then goes on to describe the shake-up at LA Times because the editor got pulled into the #metoo fiasco.
Harvey Weinstein arguably produced some of the best content in Hollywood during his tenure, and so the two shouldn't be coupled. Yea, fire the dude and move on, but don't make this about cheap content, and don't make this also about the press failing to generate revenue. All very different things and misses the nuance of what is going on.
I've been reading the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall St. Journal, BBC and others for a long time now; most of what I see published isn't improving my mind, awareness, or store of useful knowledge. Some of it is flat out wrong.
As I became more and more educated on certain topics I noticed this more and more - articles about a field I know a lot about often get the details wrong, and draw the wrong conclusions because of it. I'm reasonably sure this isn't unique to my fields of expertise.
That has nothing to do with paid/free, but if someone is going to say I should pay them to provide me with knowledge, I'd like to be sure they actually possess said knowledge, consistently.
As it is, different papers are good for different things and almost completely untrustworthy for others. By virtue of a subscription, I subsidize both.
What you're saying appears quite related to the Murray Gell-Man effect, which if cashed out in reality calls into question the value of reading the news as a way to become informed.
At least those people might be trying. I find it hard to read anything today without major bias and misleading half truths. Mainstream news is in very serious trouble and I don't know how society can save it with everyone having their claws out. We need a new leader, but who could do it?
> So let me propose a little framework: “Enjoy content. Not too much. Mostly paid”.
High quality, good free content can still be found on the web. Some people, including me, actually like the idea of giving away content for free.
I found a pretty strong visual content filter is the bling factor: you know, those extremely insightful old fashioned no bullshit plain html sites with minimal CSS, and no ads... One of the reasons they don't really need ads is because it costs pennies to host and serve KiBs of content, there is no "platform" or "ad engines" or any of that nonsense, it's just some people who want to share some insights, they write some static html and throw it up for pennies because it's KiBs. This style of content authoring tends towards good content because it's not prone to hunt for eyeballs... it's just there, there is no difference to the author or the content's existence regardless of how many views and clicks happen.
That said it doesn't have to look crude, It's some clean minimal CSS design can improve the legibility of the content immensely without bloating it - it's just less common.
I agree with your overall premise - that attention-seeking ads and whatnot is usually an indicator of bad content, but not always.
It's hard for authors to do this full-time without advertising. Who pays them if not users or advertisers? Hobbyists and amateur publishers are one thing, but people who do things and write about them full-time are searching for a way to support themselves.
I would replace "no ads" in your comment with "respectful and honest ads" (and even better if those ad fees are paid directly to the author or a small distributor that is being selective about matching ads to pages).
> It's hard for authors to do this full-time without advertising. Who pays them if not users or advertisers? Hobbyists and amateur publishers are one thing, but people who do things and write about them full-time are searching for a way to support themselves.
This is just my opinion: but I think this is the so called "problem" that people need to not solve... medium keep talking about "how can we replace the ad model", and hey, maybe in "reporting" style content this is a legitimate problem, but going forward I don't see it applying to a lot of written content, people with insightful things to write about often have those insights because they do something other than writing for a living. Directly making monkey off literature in the traditional sense is not necessary - but making the literature can indirectly make you monkey by e.g improving your employment prospects if that's important to you, not to mention writing literature can be an enjoyable art form in itself.
That kind of writing makes sense for a blog, and most blogs I see/follow don't have much advertisting that benefits the author.
> writing literature can be an art form
Right. There are some amazing writers out there who are true artists and yet have to subsidize their writing with traditional employment. The writing far outvalues the other-job output.
(This isn't a problem just for writers - many artists are starving of course)
I'd like to find a model that lets them do writing full-time and get paid in a way such that better writing => more readers => more income.
It's unclear how to pay a great writer for their writing if not for ads or directly from readers.
> Right. There are some amazing writers out there who are true artists and yet have to subsidize their writing with traditional employment. The writing far outvalues the other-job output.
My "completely free" opinion applies more to people writing informative content based on their successes and experiences separate from the writing it self.
It definitely doesn't apply for those who are writing for the sake of writing as a creative work, where the "other" job is just a means. In this case it's back to the same question, and it may even suit the content more because it's more about what people enjoy to read than what is objectively "good" of "useful", in which case voting with your monkey seems not to corrupt as much... then again there is hollywood and pop music so scratch that. I think the best ideas about for this now are things like patreon - where the focus is more on encouraging author creativity rather than monetisation of past works like copyright. However this still has it's downsides... e.g it suits and encourages continuous streams of small pieces of works more than masterpiece style sized works.
Have you explored non ad methods like patreon? I don't know if it applies to written content but I would prefer to leave a penny when I enjoy something than see ads.
I'm as ok with the rot-inducing content as I am with junk food. I don't go near junk food and so stay slim with minimal effort (I'm just past middle age). I find muscle dysmorphia repugnant and so haven't gone too far in that direction either.
And so it is with content. I read quality books. James Clavell, Robert Ruark or Frederick Forsyth for example, over J. K. Rowling or E.L James, for instance. I source my news with care, and if a story interests me I look for counter positions or arguments.
We all have this choice.
One path makes you look stupid, and, in comparison, the other makes you look interesting, learned and intelligent. Amongst other benefits.
Like I said this is a choice we all make. Regardless of income (junk food is expensive, and libraries are free).
I love the assumption that all the free content is 'junk' and the paid content is somehow better. In my experience, it's the free stuff from hobbyists that's often better than the stuff printed by professional publications, since they care about the topic rather than meaningless clicks and ad analytics.
Because the thing is:
> But if you actually want to learn, to improve your mind, to improve your awareness and understanding of the world, you have to shell out.
I don't need to shell out anything. I can find perfectly good content from people that care for free, and I myself write perfectly good content for people that are interested in the topic and provide it for free.
The people that want good content don't need to pay for it, they can find for it free. And the people who don't care for good content now...
Probably weren't caring much for it in the past either. Do you really think the folks that read the tabloid papers (or the Daily Mail) wanted a super deep, thought provoking piece that questions every bit of their world view?
That the people who watch cable news shows or what not were going to pay for something from a professional organisation?
That wasn't going to happen, and it didn't. Instead, the people who wanted good content found they could get good content elsewhere, the ones who wanted mediocre content found they could get the same stuff elsewhere and the old media are left in a situation where they're really not the best at either of these things.
> I don't need to shell out anything. I can find perfectly good content from people that care for free, and I myself write perfectly good content for people that are interested in the topic and provide it for free.
What kind of content is this, exactly?
I think you're missing the forest by focusing on a few unique trees. I agree, you're likely to find far better free stuff about tinkering around with microcontrollers (for instance) that are written by hobbyists than you will from paid publications. Taken all together, though, that kind of stuff is ultimately very limited and misses whole universes of valuable areas. For instance: news reporting, history books, etc. require a breadth of attention and effort to create that just isn't possible with a day job. If you want to "improve your mind, to improve your awareness and understanding of the world" you can't hyper-focus on hobbies.
I think the internet-model just isn't created for in-depth, thought provoking, long form articles. I am lucky enough to live in a major city, but I consume thought provoking, free content by having a library card.
Of the publications where I found thought provoking, long form articles, they are almost always a non-profit. The internet ad-based business model for content simply forbids huge ROI for real content; I totally support more-and-more non-profit content creators whose charter is quality content.
If you are interested in non-hobby, free long form writing, I always recommend Aeon[1]! For non-free, I recommend Lapham's Quarterly[2].
One thing though, I won't call aeon "free," exactly. They take donations and I would encourage people to donate if they like it, even as a one-off.
I think an idea that underlies the OP's maxim "Enjoy content. Not too much. Mostly paid," is the economics of paid content is clearer and more pro-consumer. I think that's true whether the payment actually gates the content or not.
I would say "Mostly not ad supported". It would be great if Google let one search for content on only sites that don't have ads. Of course that would never happen, but duck duck go could give it a try.
You can find a huge range of History books written by amateurs. Separating the wheat from the chaff is not always easy, but you also need a filtering method for paid works as they also have vast quantities of junk.
In terms of written content I have more or less given up on books specifically because I find free content to be far more diverse. Read a few thousand science fiction books for example and they really all blend together with minimal originality.
Much of Wikipedia (and the others) relies indirectly on the people whose careers (not hobbies) revolve around creating the content that Wikipedia cites. Same for most of Project Gutenberg.
There are exceptions, but I do think, say, dedicated long-term investigative journalism is something worth paying for, since it's not always easy to do as anything other than a "main" grind.
Start with Khan Academy. Then look into research, scientific papers, art, original series -- some eventually go commercial to make a living but there is an insane amount of free content out there, including games, music, movies and books to boot.
It's not simply miserliness that makes people reluctant to pay for articles online. It's also because subscribing is so much work. If you could pay 50 cents for an article with a single button click, a lot of people would do it. But filling out a subscription form and getting out your credit card and typing in a 16 digit number off it just to read a single article (which is all one wants at the point one is being asked to subscribe) seems like way too much work.
And what is more, am I supposed to subscribe to all sites where I occasionally find valuable content?
One of the good things about internet journalism is that I can read different publications very easily, every day. Some of them I'd actually like to pay, but not by way of a subscription, because paying for five or ten subscriptions at ~$30 per month each is just too much.
With paper newspapers, I can at least buy a single issue. With online articles, it would be feasible to pay per article, heck, even per half articles or whatever. But for some reason all the publishers come up with is obnoxious paywalls, and the option to subscribe or get lost. I honestly don't understand why micropayments haven't become a thing for online journalism.
Is there potential for a news article broker to sit between the readers and the major news sites? For example you credit an account on a news broker then when younwant to read an article the article access fee is deducted from your account. That avoids readers needed to subscribe to many newspapers or magazines and would provide a more friction free way to access specific articles.
Yes, something like that would work. I guess the biggest problem is to get the major publishers as well as the readers to work with this broker.
Flattr had a similar problem, you could pay-per-article via their button, but as I understand the adoption just wasn't sufficient, by both publishers and readers.
Maybe if publishers could add a micropayment button that used ApplePay/GooglePay/AmazonPay/PayPal, so that readers wouldn't have to sign up for an additional service and could just use their credit card in a one-click transaction.
Not sure if it was intentional, but Crichton here uses the same Pollan metaphor that Johnson makes in his book, The Information Diet. In fact the tagline is right on his site: http://informationdiet.com/
I just got finished reading the Information Diet a couple weeks ago and was pretty disappointed in the book overall. Same with this article. Both seem to have a problem that I agree with: we should be more intentional about the information we consume. However, the "solution" in both isn't fully realized or it's tainted with an agenda of some sort.
I'm really ready for a good book on this topic as I raise my kids in the junk knowledge/misinformation age.
Are you looking for a solution, or more information? _The information: a theory, a flood_ by James Gleick is good. I read it because I'm in that line of work, but I think it's a good summary of why content is produced and what the challenges are. You could also do something like _The shallows_ by Nicholas Carr, which is more of polemic than anything else, though I did enjoy it.
Perhaps _You are not a gadget_ by Jaron Lanier or _Hamlet's Blackberry_ by William Powers, but neither of those are books I could finish.
Finally, I read _Deep work_ not long ago and thought it was pretty good.
I actually loved Lanier's "You Are Not A Gadget", it was the first deep dive of technology philosophy that I've ever read, and was definitely worth finishing.
I'll definitely check out some of these other ones you mention. Thanks for the recommendations!
This is silly. There is a ton of high quality free content on the internet. What matters is taking the time and putting in the effort to ensure that you're consuming higher quality content. Even wikipedia is worthwhile as a basic introductory or survey level overview for lots of different subjects (it's hard to know what to dig into and study in depth in some area without having a general understanding first).
And there is absolutely a ton of excellent free material on youtube, of all places. Tons and tons of DIY and how-to videos. Woodworking, machining, electronics, knitting, sewing, cooking, the internet is a treasure trove of data. And some of the best educational content on linear algebra and calculus in the Universe at any price is on youtube for free (from 3blue1brown).
Overall this critique strikes me as generationalist and classist.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadThere are non-subscription models, e.g. people pay for ebooks.
There are niche subscriptions, e.g. finance, health, which cost much more than Netflix.
Some websites have occasional article gems, but there's no way to pay for a high quality, non-DRM, indexable, offline readable, surveillance-free PDF/A version.
> There are non-subscription models, e.g. people pay for ebooks.
Another nice example is Blendle.
While there exist good reasons to pay for quality journalism there's no reason why I should pay a monthly subscription to every news outlet I ever want to read anything from.
[...] if you actually want to learn, to improve your mind, to improve your awareness and understanding of the world, you have to shell out.”
The “paid” part seems awfully arbitrary. I went to a great exhibit the other night, where I got to see wonderful photography, for free. I just read a great biology paper published for free by the Royal Society on my way to work. And I am now listening to a fascinating NPR podcast, also downloaded for free.
I guess my taxes paid for all of those in some way (even though I only lived in the UK for a year, so that was a meager contribution to the Royal Society’s coffers), but I wouldn’t say I “shelled out” for all these things.
(Which should be a strong indicator that Google's SEO algorithm is wildly broken from a user's point of view. But at this point, Google, the de-facto search and web advertisement monopoly, has no incentive to prioritize quality content, and every incentive to prioritize content that brings them ad revenue. Which garbage content, presented poorly, is great at doing.)
Some days I long for DMOZ…
Information is a public good. It should be financed as public goods are: via taxes, based on ability to pay (e.g., progressive taxation).
"At the Graduate Center, we believe knowledge is a public good. This idea inspires our research, teaching, and public events. We invite you to join us for timely discussions, diverse cultural perspectives, and thought-provoking ideas."
https://www.gc.cuny.edu/Public-Programming/GC-Presents
Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325.
http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...
Free "junky" content is popular simply because it's free and plentiful, and has a vastly, unquantifiably lower barrier to entry than paid content -- and not because it's dopamine-releasing junk. It's popular because it's accessible, requires little cognitive load to evaluate ahead of time, and its momentary consumption is noncommittal. If article mills stopped producing throwaway clickbait to fill an Outbrain footer, the corresponding "demand" would plummet.
But this content keeps being produced, because business models on the web suck, so every publisher feels they have to put some eggs into advertising. Because reader attention has an upper bound, one publisher's gain is quite often another's loss, and this directly translates into advertising revenue.
Given the low appetite for the masses to pay, Apple, Google, Facebook, Medium, and incumbent news publications have all tried to solve this problem in ways that further integrate advertising, analytics, and personalized suggestions, and these efforts continue to face challenges due to the misalignment of incentives.
I get that the scale of YouTube is far too big to do it by human hands & eyes, but the approach they're taking currently is flat out failing.
It probably isn't for the creators I follow, and I try to put a few bucks of coffee money into patreon like collections for them. The value for youtube red is in time saved and advertisement avoided for the user. Then again never being interrupted by advertisements I don't go looking for is a personal eccentricity so it's a time money trade-off. How many minutes of video commercials avoided a month is worth $10?
Wæs se grimma gæst Grendel haten, mære mearcstapa, se þe moras heold, fen ond fæsten; fifelcynnes eard wonsæli wer weardode hwile, siþðan him scyppend forscrifen hæfde in Caines cynne.
Many people struggle to read their own language sadly, or comprehend stories with any amount of depth. Old English is probably asking too much of them.
I’m not convinced that this is new though, we’re just far more connected to the LCD than ever before.
Edit: Translation of excerpt:
Grendel this monster grim was called, march-riever mighty, in moorland living, in fen and fastness; fief of the giants the hapless wight a while had kept since the Creator his exile doomed. On kin of Cain was the killing avenged...
That is an extremely simplistic look at literature - you just reduced it to one sentence description of plot alone. That is not how it works and that is not how it ever worked. What makes it hard is the way it is written, presence of either dragon or killing does not make something easier to read. He is right in that most people would not enjoy it.
> And beyond that, there are many books on there that are accessible for anyone who can read.
And many many more that are decisively not accessible. You assume that people will dig for hours through guttenberg to find something fun and accessible, but they wont and probably cant.
There's more in the text than just the plot, but the story alone can be enjoyable without knowing everything else. I'll agree the old translation of an ancient poem is probably still going to be a chore, a better example is something like Dracula.
>And many many more that are decisively not accessible. You assume that people will dig for hours through guttenberg to find something fun and accessible, but they wont and probably cant.
No, I assume that people will find something fun and accessible by the same means they do elsewhere, either through talking to other people or looking at what's popular.
In short, what you’re saying isn’t wrong or unreasonable, but I think it’s fair to say that it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what “average” looks like.
And remember what's being discussed here. You can't blame "brainjunk" on people unwilling to pay for content, as they are also ignoring the free content on Project Gutenberg.
Also, if you have hard time to interpret the story, because the sentences are oddly written and unnatural and characters talk the way real people now don't talk, you wont have no fun no matter how many dragons.
> No, I assume that people will find something fun and accessible by the same means they do elsewhere, either through talking to other people or looking at what's popular.
On Guttenberg? That brain junk stuff goes out of their way to reach you. It is completely different model. That is not criticism of Guttenberg, their mission is to preserve and they do it well.
>On Guttenberg? That brain junk stuff goes out of their way to reach you. It is completely different model.
Yeah, this is the point. Project Gutenberg isn't ignored now because you need decades of education to possibly enjoy it, brainjunk is crafted to be addictive.
And the education is necessary to be able to figure out which few books on Guttenberg might be interesting to you. Because overwhelming majority of them is not interesting to you or anyone except few specialists on something.
And majority of that could not possibly replace the kind of reading you do when you relax for 6 minutes between one task and another task at work.
People read in those situations, but that is a different argument altogether.
It is great place for study, good place if you actually are into some historical period and not much of a place if you are contemporary person and just wanna have some fun. No, majority of those most popular books are not fun for most people.
Of course (freedom of choice) one may select the Kardashians (and unfortunately not the Star Trek ones) over poetry. I want them to select what they feel like consuming, and I want me to have the same choice. The problem is with many outlets switching to 'junkfood', the few that may remain become hostage to money-hungry shareholders and thus the game is slowly being lost.
The only thing that creeps up on TV consumption in the US is social media use. Billions of books containing hundreds of pages each are sold in the US each year and presumably some large fraction of those are read.
Hundreds of millions of magazine subscriptions are sold in the US, mostly of monthlies.
The metrics used to measure online success are just sort of muddled. Imagine if we evaluated magazines by how many pages were turned. You would get some very silly magazines very quickly.
Instead magazines are evaluated by the demographics of their subscribers, prestige as judged by things like prizes, and the scale of the subscriber base.
Unlike websites which just model demographics and are usually not audited, magazines can have their subscriber lists audited and are mostly not modeled. Same thing with cable TV/Netflix/other paid services. The demographics don't really have to be modeled because you have every person's name and address. Each individual or household has to pay so you know they're individuals that exist and not bots.
I think one issue with the way media companies have evaluated 'social media' is that they considered it to be another form of professional media. Really what it replaces are phone calls, mail, and in-person chatter or photo album sharing. It does not and has not really replaced traditional media consumption.
I value the level of comments here just as much and sometimes more than the articles people share
Harvey Weinstein arguably produced some of the best content in Hollywood during his tenure, and so the two shouldn't be coupled. Yea, fire the dude and move on, but don't make this about cheap content, and don't make this also about the press failing to generate revenue. All very different things and misses the nuance of what is going on.
As I became more and more educated on certain topics I noticed this more and more - articles about a field I know a lot about often get the details wrong, and draw the wrong conclusions because of it. I'm reasonably sure this isn't unique to my fields of expertise.
That has nothing to do with paid/free, but if someone is going to say I should pay them to provide me with knowledge, I'd like to be sure they actually possess said knowledge, consistently.
As it is, different papers are good for different things and almost completely untrustworthy for others. By virtue of a subscription, I subsidize both.
https://seekerblog.com/2006/01/31/the-murray-gell-mann-amnes...
High quality, good free content can still be found on the web. Some people, including me, actually like the idea of giving away content for free.
I found a pretty strong visual content filter is the bling factor: you know, those extremely insightful old fashioned no bullshit plain html sites with minimal CSS, and no ads... One of the reasons they don't really need ads is because it costs pennies to host and serve KiBs of content, there is no "platform" or "ad engines" or any of that nonsense, it's just some people who want to share some insights, they write some static html and throw it up for pennies because it's KiBs. This style of content authoring tends towards good content because it's not prone to hunt for eyeballs... it's just there, there is no difference to the author or the content's existence regardless of how many views and clicks happen.
That said it doesn't have to look crude, It's some clean minimal CSS design can improve the legibility of the content immensely without bloating it - it's just less common.
It's hard for authors to do this full-time without advertising. Who pays them if not users or advertisers? Hobbyists and amateur publishers are one thing, but people who do things and write about them full-time are searching for a way to support themselves.
I would replace "no ads" in your comment with "respectful and honest ads" (and even better if those ad fees are paid directly to the author or a small distributor that is being selective about matching ads to pages).
This is just my opinion: but I think this is the so called "problem" that people need to not solve... medium keep talking about "how can we replace the ad model", and hey, maybe in "reporting" style content this is a legitimate problem, but going forward I don't see it applying to a lot of written content, people with insightful things to write about often have those insights because they do something other than writing for a living. Directly making monkey off literature in the traditional sense is not necessary - but making the literature can indirectly make you monkey by e.g improving your employment prospects if that's important to you, not to mention writing literature can be an enjoyable art form in itself.
> writing literature can be an art form
Right. There are some amazing writers out there who are true artists and yet have to subsidize their writing with traditional employment. The writing far outvalues the other-job output.
(This isn't a problem just for writers - many artists are starving of course)
I'd like to find a model that lets them do writing full-time and get paid in a way such that better writing => more readers => more income.
It's unclear how to pay a great writer for their writing if not for ads or directly from readers.
My "completely free" opinion applies more to people writing informative content based on their successes and experiences separate from the writing it self.
It definitely doesn't apply for those who are writing for the sake of writing as a creative work, where the "other" job is just a means. In this case it's back to the same question, and it may even suit the content more because it's more about what people enjoy to read than what is objectively "good" of "useful", in which case voting with your monkey seems not to corrupt as much... then again there is hollywood and pop music so scratch that. I think the best ideas about for this now are things like patreon - where the focus is more on encouraging author creativity rather than monetisation of past works like copyright. However this still has it's downsides... e.g it suits and encourages continuous streams of small pieces of works more than masterpiece style sized works.
My site fits your descriptions, but I have avoided adding ads because all good options I know are scary and not good for the readers.
It would be nice to be able to justify writing more though.
And so it is with content. I read quality books. James Clavell, Robert Ruark or Frederick Forsyth for example, over J. K. Rowling or E.L James, for instance. I source my news with care, and if a story interests me I look for counter positions or arguments.
We all have this choice.
One path makes you look stupid, and, in comparison, the other makes you look interesting, learned and intelligent. Amongst other benefits.
Like I said this is a choice we all make. Regardless of income (junk food is expensive, and libraries are free).
Because the thing is:
> But if you actually want to learn, to improve your mind, to improve your awareness and understanding of the world, you have to shell out.
I don't need to shell out anything. I can find perfectly good content from people that care for free, and I myself write perfectly good content for people that are interested in the topic and provide it for free.
The people that want good content don't need to pay for it, they can find for it free. And the people who don't care for good content now...
Probably weren't caring much for it in the past either. Do you really think the folks that read the tabloid papers (or the Daily Mail) wanted a super deep, thought provoking piece that questions every bit of their world view?
That the people who watch cable news shows or what not were going to pay for something from a professional organisation?
That wasn't going to happen, and it didn't. Instead, the people who wanted good content found they could get good content elsewhere, the ones who wanted mediocre content found they could get the same stuff elsewhere and the old media are left in a situation where they're really not the best at either of these things.
What kind of content is this, exactly?
I think you're missing the forest by focusing on a few unique trees. I agree, you're likely to find far better free stuff about tinkering around with microcontrollers (for instance) that are written by hobbyists than you will from paid publications. Taken all together, though, that kind of stuff is ultimately very limited and misses whole universes of valuable areas. For instance: news reporting, history books, etc. require a breadth of attention and effort to create that just isn't possible with a day job. If you want to "improve your mind, to improve your awareness and understanding of the world" you can't hyper-focus on hobbies.
Of the publications where I found thought provoking, long form articles, they are almost always a non-profit. The internet ad-based business model for content simply forbids huge ROI for real content; I totally support more-and-more non-profit content creators whose charter is quality content.
If you are interested in non-hobby, free long form writing, I always recommend Aeon[1]! For non-free, I recommend Lapham's Quarterly[2].
https://aeon.co/ https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
One thing though, I won't call aeon "free," exactly. They take donations and I would encourage people to donate if they like it, even as a one-off.
I think an idea that underlies the OP's maxim "Enjoy content. Not too much. Mostly paid," is the economics of paid content is clearer and more pro-consumer. I think that's true whether the payment actually gates the content or not.
In terms of written content I have more or less given up on books specifically because I find free content to be far more diverse. Read a few thousand science fiction books for example and they really all blend together with minimal originality.
There are exceptions, but I do think, say, dedicated long-term investigative journalism is something worth paying for, since it's not always easy to do as anything other than a "main" grind.
One of the good things about internet journalism is that I can read different publications very easily, every day. Some of them I'd actually like to pay, but not by way of a subscription, because paying for five or ten subscriptions at ~$30 per month each is just too much.
With paper newspapers, I can at least buy a single issue. With online articles, it would be feasible to pay per article, heck, even per half articles or whatever. But for some reason all the publishers come up with is obnoxious paywalls, and the option to subscribe or get lost. I honestly don't understand why micropayments haven't become a thing for online journalism.
Flattr had a similar problem, you could pay-per-article via their button, but as I understand the adoption just wasn't sufficient, by both publishers and readers.
Maybe if publishers could add a micropayment button that used ApplePay/GooglePay/AmazonPay/PayPal, so that readers wouldn't have to sign up for an additional service and could just use their credit card in a one-click transaction.
I just got finished reading the Information Diet a couple weeks ago and was pretty disappointed in the book overall. Same with this article. Both seem to have a problem that I agree with: we should be more intentional about the information we consume. However, the "solution" in both isn't fully realized or it's tainted with an agenda of some sort.
I'm really ready for a good book on this topic as I raise my kids in the junk knowledge/misinformation age.
Anybody have any recommendations?
Perhaps _You are not a gadget_ by Jaron Lanier or _Hamlet's Blackberry_ by William Powers, but neither of those are books I could finish.
Finally, I read _Deep work_ not long ago and thought it was pretty good.
I actually loved Lanier's "You Are Not A Gadget", it was the first deep dive of technology philosophy that I've ever read, and was definitely worth finishing.
I'll definitely check out some of these other ones you mention. Thanks for the recommendations!
And there is absolutely a ton of excellent free material on youtube, of all places. Tons and tons of DIY and how-to videos. Woodworking, machining, electronics, knitting, sewing, cooking, the internet is a treasure trove of data. And some of the best educational content on linear algebra and calculus in the Universe at any price is on youtube for free (from 3blue1brown).
Overall this critique strikes me as generationalist and classist.