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Comment by Tech-Noir | Hacker News Reader

He's not saying memes are the future of comedy, he's complaining that people are making jokes for free:

> the whole point of [Pitch] is to pay people for jokes because I hated seeing people just giving work away for free

Perhaps people want to crack jokes for free, because it makes them feel good. Not everyone wants to monetize basic human interaction.

If anything is killing anything it's monetization uber alles.

So instead of people cracking jokes on internet forums or their local pub, he'd prefer it if they confined their material to his app instead, so he can financially benefit from it.

That's the thing about a lot of Facebook haters. They don't really hate Facebook, they hate that they're not Facebook.

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  If anything is killing anything it's
  monetization uber alles.

I believe the traditional logic is:

1. X is good.

2. To achieve the best X, we should allow our best X people to dedicate their lives to it full time.

3. That means paying and equipping them, which needs revenue.

4. Therefore things that increase our revenue are good and things that decrease our revenue are bad.

where X is almost anything in the entertainment industry, and quite a few things outside it too.

Ain't it funny though when people are for of a free market when it works in their favor, but against it when it doesn't? I.e. when you undercut someone else's price, that's a market miracle! When someone undercuts you, that's a race to the bottom, and a clear sign of the end of the golden age...

> 2. To achieve the best X, we should allow our best X people to dedicate their lives to it full time.

Yeah, that's the real killer. One person comes up with the current best thing, and maybe even does it a few times. But a crowd or industry of like minded people can typically put out a fairly continual stream of stuff like that. Is any one person out of that crowd worth singling out for such treatment?

Another issue is things become "best" especially in entertainment when they're unique and creative. You can't bottle lightning, and you can't pay for it either. Individuals who pulled out the "best" for now will be stale tomorrow. How do you predict the next new "best" that hasn't put out anything at that level yet?

sounds like a good use of a basic income

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