Comment by spinningslate
1 year ago
From TFA:
> If anything, the need has increased as social media and changing advertising landscapes have made shallow, sensationalistic reporting all the more lucrative.
And your comment:
> There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage
It's Friday so I'm going to be optimistic. I'd like to think (maybe fantasise) that we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content. There are some promising shoots, from paid newsletters (e.g. stratechery plus [0]) to search (e.g. Kagi [1]). There are early signs that Browsers are coming back as a topic with Chrome's inexorable slide into increasingly obfuscated ways to slurp data [2] and the (very) early promise of e.g. ladybird [3] as the first genuinely new, ground-up browser for years.
It's never going to be mainstream. As someone once wrote here, the economy is a machine that incessantly drives cost down. Orthodoxy says you can't get cheaper than free - but that presumes measuring cost solely in monetary terms. Widen the definition of "cost" though and what we have now is definitely not free: we pay with loss of privacy, social disfunction and mental health degradation among others.
Challenging the commercial behemoths who benefit from the "free internet" myth is a massive task. Perhaps unassailable. If there's an upside, it's that the long tail - where quality, paid for content and services might thrive - is simultaneously meaningful enough to support a small but thriving industry, and small enough to be uninteresting to the 1000lb gorillas.
That may be fantasy per above. But I'd rather cling to something hopeful.
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EDIT: fixed grammar.
> we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content
I'm a bit more pessimistic I guess. Netflix at one point felt like the end of piracy, because it was becoming the portal to all great video content. Then everyone wanted a slice of the pie and started their own platform. Now, Netflix is starting to fill up with 'sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content' and they really seem to want to become ad-fuelled.
I also dislike that I have to choose between giving up all my privacy to a ton of ad providers or needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content.
I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way to become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I can pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that will never happen, since it gives too much power to that one platform.
For a while I thought that blockchain/crypto might be a good way to fix this. But nobody seems to be building blockchain stuff to do the right thing, they only do it to rip people off.
> needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content.
Mind this is sort of how it used to work.
Outside of broadcast TV and radio, you either subscribed to everything (newspapers, magazines, newsletters) or you bought them ad hoc one by one at the newsstand.
A problem with modern subscriptions is that they auto renew, and thus can be hard to cancel, and they tend to be quite expensive (everyone wants a “mere” $10/month).
>...or you bought them ad hoc one by one at the newsstand...
100% This is what is missing. I don't want to subscribe to the New York Times for £90 per year because I only want to read about 5 to 10 NYT articles a year. Why can't I pay £1.50 for 15 articles? That would be about the same as buying a physical copy of a paper from a newsagent; if I buy a physical copy I probably read about that many articles from it before it gets recycled. Instead I either don't read the article I've found to or I try to find it on the internet archive which is really irritating. I would like to read articles in a range of papers; say 3-4 UK broadsheets, occasionally some international papers like the NYT, Le Monde and a couple of trade papers. If I subscribed to 4 UK broadsheet newspapers I would already be paying >£400/year in newspaper subscriptions. Who does this? I can't understand why newspapers can't see that no-one wants to be spending that sort of money and why they can't come up with a better solution. If the problem is card fees on micro transactions why don't they club together and create some kind of patreon type thing that agglomerates transactions together?
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> or needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content
Cable still exists. People wanted the ability to sub to whatever they wanted (often leaving out sports for example). That's happened and now people want it all in one place. It turns out what people want is everything in one place for free, which is leading Netflix to have an ad-tier. Though, re-bundling is going to take some time as consolidation happens.
Actually for most part I don't want to subscribe.
And I don't want free ad sponsored.
I just want to pay a reasonable (I'll get back to this) price for the things I actually want.
Netflix was OK with me (and I think a number of others) despite being a subscription service not because it was a subscription.
It was OK because it was
- the only option
- reasonably priced
- and had "everything" one wanted
So what is reasonable?
I'd assume that with all the cost savings given the digitalization of the delivery at least it shouldn't be more expensive than renting a physical dvd, although I'd accept if they adjusted a little for inflation.
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> It turns out what people want is everything in one place for free
I'd say this is provably false based on the popularity of streaming services, specifically the rise of Netflix's streaming service. That is the opposite of free.
Netflix is not offering ad tiers due to a lack of subscribers; they are doing it because there were a handful of quarters where revenue stagnated. This does not mean it was a bad business model; it means they want perpetual growth to satisfy shareholders. Same old story.
The reasons cable was and is bad and was destined to be replaced:
- No ability to unbundle (as you said)
- Messy time-shifting (DVRs, PPV, all that nonsense)
- Complicated and limited setup (proprietary hardware; extra fees for multiple devices; no ability to view on a computer or mobile device)
- Tons of fun trying to cancel
Cable has two real advantages:
- Fast channel switching
- Garbage exclusivity contracts
Streaming doesn't solve exclusivity but it certainly doesn't make it worse. In fact, making it easier to subscribe and cancel makes it significantly better.
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Don't worry by the way, cable boxes, Netflix, and televisions will give away your privacy even if you pay
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It turns out what people want is everything in one place for free
No, it doesn't "turn out" that way at all. But if the pirates provide better service for free than the proprietors offer at any price, that can hardly be seen as my problem as a consumer.
For a few brief, shining years, it looked like the media and entertainment industries were starting to understand that. Turned out not to be the case, though.
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Cable is laced with advertising and is linear, whereas much of the world has moved on to on demand. Further, what folks always wanted back in the days before streaming was the ability not to pay for genres they didn't want. Netflix had a reasonable low price for a while so it was worth it even if you only really watched one or two genres they had, and ignored the rest of the content. But with higher prices, it is ever more difficult to justify. Disney used to offer Disney, Hulu, and ESPN separately or as a bundle, so if you didn't watch sports, you could just get Disney and Hulu. Or if you just wanted Disney, you could get that. But they have raised prices and increasingly pushed bundling.
I for one would be perfectly willing to have an option where I could get Westerns for 2 or 3 bucks a month, Action/super heros for 2 or 3 bucks, SciFi for 2 or 3 bucks, Romance/RomCom for a buck. Kids/cartoons for a buck or two etc. And then choose what I want to subscribe to each month. But if you are going to charge me 20 bucks a month, you had better have 20 bucks a month worth of content that I actually want to watch. (and no ads). Oh, and stop making good shows with cliff hanger endings and then canceling them!
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> Netflix at one point felt like the end of piracy, because it was becoming the portal to all great video content. Then everyone wanted a slice of the pie and started their own platform.
In other words, we got competition. If Netflix remained the sole streaming platform of significance it would be lumped in with the monopoly talk that clouds Google, Amazon, Apple and the other trillion dollar corporations.
If anything this is a good thing, competition happened before Netflix could dominate completely.
> In other words, we got competition. If Netflix remained the sole streaming platform of significance it would be lumped in with the monopoly talk that clouds Google, Amazon, Apple and the other trillion dollar corporations.
This "competition" increased prices, which is not the desired result from competition. The problem is that copyright holders have too much power over their content, especially older content. If copyright holders were required to license content to anyone who wished to publish or redistribute it after, say, 10 years of initial publishing, that would be a form of competition that would decrease prices.
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Some competition, in the wrong place.
Exclusive licencing is the problem, giving a 'monopoly' of sorts on streaming particular content. If everything was available everywhere, they just paid pay per view royalties say, then we'd have proper competition on pricing models & the quality of service provided.
Steam has locked up the gaming market on PCs and so far it has been all upside. The decline of Netflix and the proliferation of generally worse alternatives has not been a boon for anyone but rent-seekers. This theory of competition is not holding up here.
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> If Netflix remained the sole streaming platform of significance it would be lumped in with the monopoly talk....
Spotify, Google, Amazon, Apple, Tidal all manage to have almost comprehensive music catalogs for me to stream. It's rare that I find something on one platform that isn't on another (Some artist exceptions exist, and are rare).
Pick 10 random films off the AFI top 100 list and tell me how to stream them. How many services do I need to watch them "for free".
Consumers want a single point of access to content. If I want to listen to a song I go to my music platform, if I want to watch content I go to the web to find out who has it... That friction is what consumers dont want or need.
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Almost all criticisms of monopolies comes from the abuse they enable. On an abstract level, a monopoly is the best option, because it removes so much extra cost, and has the ultimate scaling factor. Like early Netflix with it's seemingly infinite catalog.
In practice, of course, monopolies under capitalism exist specifically to exploit it, making things far worse for customers in the long run.
Steam is, to me, the closest we have to a benevolent monopoly. A monopoly that exists purely because it offers the best product.
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> In other words, we got competition.
No, we got fragmentation. If we had competition I could pay netflix to watch the same content that I could otherwise watch on hulu if I made the choice to pay hulu instead.
Since everyone has their own exclusive content paywalled off behind their own services, we're stuck with lot of tiny monopolies.
That's why prices are skyrocketing, and we have a bunch of examples of shitty/infuriating interfaces that get in the way of users and prevent them from what they want, instead of a battle between streaming services to offer the best/most features users want at the lowest prices.
"> we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content"
I am also a bit pessimistic about this, but rather think the danger comes from LLMs making even more convincing clickbait and "facts". Cheap, easy to consume, if there are enough clicks, there is enough ad money.
Something real was misrepresented, so there was a lot of outcry? Awesome, lots of clicks. Lots of money. We can later apoligize, that the LLM summarizing made a misstake there.
As long as ads dominate where the money comes from for newspapers, not much will change.
I think another alternative here, is the existence of broad spectrum “summary as a service” is that “content for content’s sake” and blog spam and SEO become less relevant.
Maybe not, but I hope so.
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Brave is building something that sounds like it might be right up your alley, but adoption of their payment system has been rather low, and I doubt Mozilla has enough street cred to be more successful after the last ten years of their mismanagement and the market share hovering just above 0%.
If Mozilla's market share is an impediment to the adoption, then have I got some bad news for you about Brave....
(I say this as a happy user of Brave on Android)
> I also dislike that I have to choose between giving up all my privacy to a ton of ad providers or needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content.
> I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way to become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I can pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that will never happen, since it gives too much power to that one platform.
You mean you want... the cable TV bundle again? Literally the thing that the article rails against, because cable TV inherently produces "sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting."
Amazing.
> the cable TV bundle again?
No, that's why I didn't write that. Spotify allows nearly everyone to put their music on the platform. Just this week I listened to some music with <1000 plays that I found in a random video somewhere. I choose what I want to listen to and a part of the fee I pay gets transferred to the creator. I don't need to buy 100 different subscriptions to labels and musicians, it's centralized.
(Yes, I know Spotify isn't perfect and that there are valid criticisms of the platform. I'm not using it as an example of a perfect end goal, I'm using it as an example of the only thing right now that gets somewhat in the neighborhood. And in the industry there are multiple platforms who distribute mostly the same content with only some 'exclusive' releases. Which is what I'd like to see for the web.)
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I would LOVE a streaming bundle that included all the content for a discount if and only if it remained ad free.
The big draw for me for streaming is not price, it is removal of ads.
It was totally predictable that many of the same people who hated on the cable bundle also hate on a fragmented streaming landscape even though they probably pay significantly less than they did for cable TV unless they also pay for live TV anyway. (And they'd also hate on an all-inclusive integrated streaming service for the hundreds of dollars a month it would cost.)
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I think we're past a low point of ad-fueled low-value content. Better alternatives will arise, grow, and become ubiquitous - but then they too will grow more expensive, become corrupted, and be circumvented in turn.
Media, art, and info distribution are never static targets, and even if a stable equilibrium exists and can be reached that does not mean that society will not oscillate around it.
> because it was becoming the portal to all great video content.
Only if your preference of content happens to match what NetFlix offers, which is not the case for many/most people.
> Netflix at one point felt like the end of piracy
I think you have it the wrong way round. Piracy is the solution to Netflix (the bloated, enshittified 'content provider') just like piracy has been the solution to all the centralised media platform monopolies that came before it, that Netflix first disrupted and then joined.
As an individual it's meritorious to pay creators and pay creative collectives (e.g. studios). But it's never meritorious to pay media platforms that act as middle men. They are in the business of ripping off both the creators and their audience ('consumers' in modern parlance). You're only a sucker if you buy into their self-serving moralising narratives. The right and moral thing is to parasite them to death, by piracy. (Or boycott them; also a valid choice.)
Nope. They had it exactly right. Notice the past tense. You're just adding more context to what they said. I was able to skip out on usenet for quite a while during the Netflix golden years because Netflix made consuming content much easier than pirating at the time. But it's back to where things were before and we've got better tools for "alternate sources" of such content.
Our economic model encourages this kind of race to the bottom enshitification of everything. Unfortunately there are no high-tech solutions to this problem. The technology we need to improve is our political/economic system.
Perhaps with wealthy country populations projected to fall dramatically we will finally be forced to find a way other than "growth" to value human endeavour. That would be the most likely path to a solution, I fear it will be rather painful.
Our economic model (is supposed to) boil down to producing our goods and services using the least amount of resources. Sure, that yields planned obsolescence and enshittification, but also cheap multi-GHz laptops and widespread Internet availability.
I never believed that internet advertising was worth what it supposedly is. Stuff like this seems to confirm it for me: https://www.adexchanger.com/on-tv-and-video/googles-second-w...
I think internet advertising is massively overvalued, the initial bubble happened when the click fraud detection tools were nonexistent, and because Google hasn't been changed, everyone assumes their valuation is right and correct.
internet advertising as a means to sell garbage is overvalued, but it enables a system of pervasive surveillance that allows governments and companies to exploit your data offline too. As long as the tracking continued, the buying and selling of the most intimate details of your life would still be a massive and growing industry even if no one ever put an ad on a webpage again. Advertising is also effective at manipulating public perception/opinion though so it's not going anywhere either way.
People would pay for far more if charged a nominal markup over what their readership is considered worth when subsidized by ads.
But no, when subscribing, they're expected to pay 10x or 100x or 1000x their ad-impression worth.
Subscription aggregation (a Hulu of things to read, like the firm Apple purchased* and made into Apple News+) is one answer.
Another would be a IWP (In-Web Purchase) browser standard like DNT except its an "I'm willing to buy the ad slots on this page at the median CPM" token, coupled to something like the mythical micro-transactions settlement schemes of yore that would now actually be possible on top of systems handling IAP.
* Next Issue aka Texture. I was a subscriber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_(app)
Is it that different once all the additional costs are taken into account? Payment processing / refunds / customer service etc etc that you need when you're taking payments, vs just pasting some Javascript on a page and giving Google your bank account details?
I kind of like the OutsideOnline model where I pay for the apps (trailforks gaiagps) but also get access to decent content. Though I guess that is close to the old cable TV bundle model that sucked.
I pay for Kagi, NextDNS, Youtube to keep ads at bay. If there was a bundled content network beyond just Youtube infomercials posing as content it would be even more appealing.
I've wondered if things might get bad enough to enable a fork of the web. It could happen 2 ways:
1) A truly user focused browser is created, the fabled "user agent". The ad-focused web doesn't support that browser, but websites that care about users do support it. Thus, people who want more than ad-drivel use the niche browser and have access to a web full of weird and non-profit-focused content.
2) Possibly a fork of the underlying technologies. Maybe the browser mentioned uses incompatible technologies or protocols. Maybe this new web is based on something other than HTML and JavaScript.
Probably not. It's a wild idea. It's probably too hard to do better than the existing technologies, and the effort required for such a fork seems ever less likely in this time of dissipating focus and hobbies.
It already exists, it's called Geminispace: https://geminiprotocol.net/
Gemini is still client/server, so it encourages the same problems of scale that HTTP has where you can't afford to run a server unless you have a source of income. IE. it would get infested by adtech the same as HTTP if it got popular enough. IMO the only way to get something that wouldn't suffer the same fate would be to make it a peer-to-peer application where everyone using the client application was also hosting a server.
> Thus, people who want more than ad-drivel use the niche browser and have access to a web full of weird and non-profit-focused content.
This is a technical solution to a non-technical problem. If you want to only access esoteric websites, you can do that today. If you want to block ads and tracking, you can do that today. If you want to only visit websites that don't require ad support, you can do that today.
What you need is a way to pay people for content so they don't need to have ads. Can you solve that problem?
Peer-to-peer web where people don't need to pay for servers but donate some disk space and network bandwidth to participate. The content generated by passionate people that only wants their content to be out there, not make money out of it. A p2p geocities if you will.
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web3 is that. Pay for content / services you use through micro transactions.
If by web3 you mean crypto currencies then I ask you nicely to stop using web3 for that.
Web3 is things like json-ld and the like and it is tragic that scammers have been able to abuse the term for so long.
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Arbitrary server-chosen microtransactions make things worse in many ways even if the payment process is simple, fast, and free.
Wow, lots of luddites here for what's supposed to be a tech community.
Get your head out of your asses guys. There's nothing inherently bad about blockchain or decentralization.
"web3" is nothing but another crypto-scam.
Please stop.
++++++ to Kagi.