That was the dream of the early internet, and with the centralised nature of Facebook, Google Groups it has faded.
It's easy enough for me as somebody technical. But what about my non-technical friends? They move to Medium, Facebook, Blogger, etc, as a way of hosting their content because it's easier.
WordPress is probably the remaining champion of the easy-to-use open web, and all we do is bitch about how slow and insecure it is.
That is perfectly fine and there is nothing that stands in your way of doing that - more power to you! There is a contingent who do not want to pay for, or view ads on content from publishers who would like to make money from their content (because it is their day-job)
Not to mention opinion writers or critics: They already have the privilege of pushing their opinions on a large audience. Why should we pay them? For their eloquence? Sure it's a lot of work, being persuasive in writing, but is it the audience who should pay for being persuaded?
I think that the collective action problem of paying for the stuff we want can be solved, will be solved - even is solved, in increasingly many ways. But there's a lot of things we're used to that we don't really want, in proportion to what we used to pay for it.
https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators
Sure, it's a good pay check for one, acceptable for two if you're in the top 10 or 20 patreons, but nobody is coming back to your site if you have 1 or 2 contributors. Now, put together a team to compete with current media, and it simply doesn't add up. This could change, but I was expecting bigger numbers by now.
edit: I just want to clarify, we didn't go with a Patreon model. My expectation was that the amount donated for Patreons would be bigger by now.
The last has 2 entries with similar number of patreons (Aaron Mahnke, podcast, with 1726 and Jessica Nigri, cosplayer, with 1634) and vastly different income (8k vs 23k).
I'd say Internet would be 100x better if those sites that complain about "business models" all went bust.
And the WSJ is as far as I know not one of those offering a full RSS feed for free, so that'd probably fall under "not honest" in their definition.
The real problem might be that it's advertisers who need lots of reporters; the public doesn't, because there is only so much news that's worth paying to read. The only answer would be to avoid trying too hard to scale.
It strikes me as ironic when someone uses uncompensated content to criticize uncompensated content.