What has Internet done to Media?

This is a huge, well written article. I wish I found such an article everyday, but they are rare. I disagree with some of the points the author makes. It is clear that he is biased towards content creators and against sharing, but at least he mentions the opposing points of view and tries to be inclusive.

It might be true that music and media have been squeezed. I find it surprising, because a few years ago there were some articles stating record profits. But let's say it is true - many traditional domains are in decline, and creators are not creating quality content as much as they used to, because they receive less income.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. People stop using old media and forms of art because they are developing new forms. In the past we were talking about fishing, now about JavaScript. We used to get all our reading from books, now the lion share is taken by forums and online articles. We are developing new ways to create and enjoy, and that is why the old ways are in decline.

For example I spend more time reading arxiv articles (and their github repos when available) instead of newspaper articles. I prefer the commentary of a small subreddit to that of most newspapers. I take music discovery in my own hands and have never been happier (much more than in the age of CD and radio, when availability was scarce). I almost never need their guidance to discover music, or their articles to discuss events. I can get the gist of an evolving media event from Wikipedia, and it's much better structured. If I am interested in gaming, I can watch free live game streaming created by other players. That is why the old content creation for money is in decline - because we are creating new ways to get what we need.

I've thought for a while now that the design of the internet may have been fundamentally sabotaged by that fact that it was primarily created by government funded academics. In that scenario, there wasn't any need to attach a price to any part of the resources used by this new creation, since it's creators paid few if any costs for it themselves. So eventually the internet grew up to be fundamentally free, where to charge a price to download a webpage goes against every instinct baked into the system and the user.

What other method of information transfer has no default method of requiring payment before transferring information? If the internet had had to pay for itself at any point during it's beginning, you can bet that HTTP status code "402 Payment Required" wouldn't of sat abandoned for 20 years with no implementation.

Some points to consider: - Self publishing of ebooks seem to work better for a bunch of authors (source: Planet Money Podcast) - There are bands which make money by having concerts and releasing there music for free. - I prefer not having my gouvernment to decide what is propaganda and what not. -Big media companies where screwing their artists for decades. Now there are alternatives. - I'm still not using Facebook, and I'm fine. - Freedom enables so much, like Netflix or the Brave browser, I like it.

Just about everything he has listed is correct.

The advertising model is failing the internet and content creation in general. The person who solves this will not only have content creators absolutely flocking to them out of absolute need to save their industries, they will also have the benefit of knowing they made a huge contribution in saving the internet.

I liked the first half of the article, especially the analysis of aggregators' profiteering on the backs of creators.

But it has a few serious problems.

- If economists are to be believed, the cost/value of a good tends towards its marginal cost, without regard for sunken capital costs. This is the trend that seems hard for musicians to fight. Movies are slightly less affected because the cost of transferring multiple GBs (and then getting them piped into the screen of your choosing) is further from zero (esp. if you take time into account), but that will tend downward with time.

- He laments the loss of magazine or other expert reviewers who can guide purchasers. Crowdsourced reviews on Amazon or Steam for games are amazing and only augment, not replace, expert reviews. The number of websites with expert reviewers seems to outnumber (and out-expert) the available reviewers of old. Amazon is currently losing the battle against spam reviews, imo, but I'm holding out hope that the situation will improve (and there are browser plugins to help).

He also begins the article talking about the open, sharing nature of academics but then strays quite far into advocating that society should not promote the free sharing of ideas and discoveries. Because he fears that if the ideas can be freely shared then the big players will be the only ones to profit while the creators get no reward. That's likely true, but his medicine (ramping up all copyright violations to full criminal status) seems worse than the disease.

Interesting ideas and I learned a lot from the piece, but so many of his solutions boil down to applying pre-digital mechanisms to digital media or just trying to unwind the clock and effects of the digital age. And a depressing hopelessness that I don't share.

Finally, he gives zero credit to the value that his villains (Google, Apple, Amazon, et al) have contributed to society. Maybe the price we've paid for those benefits in giving up privacy have been too high, that is maybe we are getting the raw end of the deal, but you can't discount to zero what we've gotten in return. As for me, I think we've gotten a pretty good deal.

On the author's points on content creation and advertising revenue, I think services like Patreon are making a huge dent in the right direction:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-patreon-is-disrupting-yout...