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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

The free structure of the Internet was the only way it could have appeared and is still the only way most of it can operate, for good or for ill.

Even more, people attacking the free part tend to evoke an image of all the other manipulative parts of modern media vanishing if people somehow pay. But the Wall Street Journal and to a lesser extent the New York Times, do their best to be paid but it's the same sort of product, trying to eyeballs. Spotify has a paid and an advertisement based service. It's the same service. Media, free or not, is based on attention. In fact, in the present and earlier eras, advertising gave more money than subscriptions for all the subscription based magazines - subscriptions are valuable to show advertisers your loyal customs.

What's the solution for the problematic of modern media? I could recommend this text but it takes concentrated reading to get through.

http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/

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Before the web, newspapers, magazines and other media could afford writers, editors and journalists, and the effect of the web was for print media to gut its infrastructure and budgets in favor of intern bloggers and clickbait because it couldn't be free and afford to compete with random no-budget sites and Twitter feeds otherwise. The news used to be worth paying for, and for some reason people seem to have convinced themselves that the media was never better than it is now, but before everything was on the web, it really was better.

The free web has democratized media and publishing in many radical and transformative ways, but in the process of unseating the old media gatekeepers has also completely destroyed the quality of journalism and long-form content, worldwide.

"Destroyed" may be a too strong word. It may currently be a little hidden below the layer of all the crap out there, but good journalism is not dead and once reasonable payment models have beeb worked out, it can easily come back.

Mind you that this has not been going on for that long. 15-20 years maybe. In the bigger picture, that's nothing.

15 to 20 years is long enough to affect journalists’ ability to provide for their family and save for retirement, and signal to other possible high caliber journalists that journalism is not a viable path for them.

Confirmed: I've spent a long time trying to start a career in journalism in the UK and it is simply not possible. Freelance rates have hit close to zero unless you already know editors in person. Jobs are increasingly scarce as newspaper staffs shrink. Local papers which once had fifty employees will now have ten or fifteen. The descent has been brutal, the result is the foreseeable end of journalism as a fully fledged profession. Well, for those who don't know editors personally.

We have dramatically fewer journalists now, but a great deal more news. There's more noise now but there's also more of what journalists traditionally did. It isn't great if you relied on journalism specifically to pay the bills but the rest of the system doesn't seem to have suffered too bad.

How are fewer journalists accomplishing more journalism? It’s a very time intensive, travel intensive task with high risks.

The idea that a system is fine in which the creators have little means to earn money is crazy to me. Lots of places will just go without the deep, investigative journalism we might have benefited from in the recent past.

Replaced by noise, as you say.

> Mind you that this has not been going on for that long. 15-20 years maybe. In the bigger picture, that's nothing.

We're all impatient, though. 15 years is about how long I'm an adult. 20 years is about how long I'm able to make use of news. If the way out of this mess is going to take another 20 years, it's not going to be of much use to me :). "In the long run" is good, but "within the productive lifetime of people concerned about it" would be best.

I'm not sure that's the whole story. I feel that political leadership really woke up to how the cult of personality and limited attention spans could be used to manipulate the message for the masses.

It started much earlier in the US I believe but came into full swing in the UK with Tony Blair's Labour. [0] you can be sure she wasn't the only one, just someone that got caught.

News media in particular has become so polarised and only really feeds into it's own respective echo chambers, to the point where it's all but useless as an impartial presentation of facts and opinions.

There is still some great instructional and educational content on Web and it feels for the moment all of these issues are still limited to news and entertainment.

[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/1588323.stm

The attention spans have been shortening since Gutenberg invented the printing if not well before that.

Television ushered the era of contentless spew well before the Internet. The Internet gave more variety than the TV world but indeed devastated the print journalism world that had existed before.

The point is this all part of a long term trend. That said, more media generally means that there is a significant amount of decent content still available but, yeah, the quality of the content produced by journalist institutions continues to decline. You'd need an extreme reversal of overall social trends to change the sound-bite factor here.

The internet was born as a military R&D program and remains one today. What is the "free" web? What is the "free" structure of the internet? I assume "free" is not used here to mean "fault-tolerant" or "capable of routing around failed nodes"

Debord was not worried at all with the "problematic of modern media"

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