This pattern is purely a representation of how financially hurt news institutions are. They are desperate to make revenue and the end user experience is sacrificed in the name of keeping the ship afloat (and sometimes profit).
Admit defeat.
Get used to just making a barely livable income, like the rest of us.
Stop begging. Stop the obnoxious ads. Stop the shady subscription schemes. Enough with the .99 cent for six week promos. We obviously don't value you enough to give your access to our debit cards.
Newspapers you lost the war.
The sooner you realize it the better.
Follow the PBS model at this point.
(And I realize the importance of non-biased news. I wouldn't mind seeing tax money going to certain high quality organizations.)
Yes, tech is better than most other jobs, but most tech jobs just give you the middle class life many people had 20-30 years ago (aside from the tech gadgets that didn’t exist 20-30 years ago that even the poor have now). In terms of large expenses and free time rather than gadgets, we’re no better than the middle class of the last generation.
Which is and should be disappointing given that it’s one of the best jobs available.
I just don't waste my money on stupid things like paying other people to make my sandwiches and drinks, or gadgets that are priced as 10x what they cost to make.
My house is better than my parents where I grew up to start with, my car is electric, I have free electricity from the sun, a TV larger than anyone could imagine back then (with films for £1 with the same quality as a cinema), I can communicate with almost anyone on the planet, via video, for free (including free translation), I can buy a computer like on Star Trek that I can talk to for £20, life is magical.
At the same time, I wonder if this is a bit of survivorship bias? I'm sure there are many people who do manage to live better than their parents, but is that common or the exception?
I was raised by a single parent who was in the "working poor" class, who managed to own their own home. I am a bit disappointed that it would be far more difficult for me to own a home anywhere within even 1 hour driving (each way) from the job centers, than it was for them to own a home. Despite longer working hours, more education, and so on.
The cost of rent and a mortgage seem similar, is the problem a deposit, or the cost per month?
However, I think there's still a bunch of niches that can be exploited, to both personal and societal benefit, if you explicitly give up on becoming a billionaire with a monopoly over locked in users.
Basically, find something that would be a Billion dollar global business, and then do it on a small local scale in a non-user hostile way.
Think about all the negative things you (or rather the self-directed corporation you create) would do once you've locked in your audience to get those billions (more intrusive ads, clickbait, adding gambling elements to your kid focused app etc.) Then actively prevent yourself from doing them via some kind of organisational structure, like a B corp or non-profit. In game theory terms, this is burning your boats to force yourself to go in a specific direction even if tempted to retreat.
This lets people buy into the idea without the feeling that they're going to get stabbed in the back later.
Do all the things a genuinely user focused company would do if they weren't afraid of going out of business.
You might not be able to employ thousands of marketers, salesmen etc. but can you make a decent software salary without slaving for an ad business? Being able to locate anywhere, work for yourself and possibly have tax benefits of running a charity may swing the decision.
If enough geeks do this, you could end up with some co-operative federation of small independent orgs, like a version of GNU, Linux, Unix for replacing the current web's Facebook's and Amazon's, just as they did to Solaris and Oracle.
I have no idea how rich Linus is for example, but I'd guess 99.9% of nerds would happily switch to being him or small scale version of him.
At the moment most of that energy seems aimed at VC backed small companies that use the "changing the world" motivation and then later sell out.
Co-ops in a variety of industries, fair-trade, ethical makeup and others have developed similar models with reasonable success, someone just needs to perfect the formula for user facing web apps.
> I have no idea how rich Linus is for example, but I'd guess 99.9% of nerds would happily switch to being him
LOL, yes, this represents the 1 in 1,000,000 extreme of programmer celebrity that is far more than anyone could reasonably hope for.
Sure, you might cross-check an article once in a blue moon, but most people consume news through a link that was sent to them by someone inside their bubble. And once they read the headline, there's 0 reason to click to another link with the same story ever again. So the links might as well be hosted in one place, say NY times or CNN. It doesn't really matter where.
The second part of the issue is that the barrier to entry into modern "journalism" evaporated with the advent of social media. You no longer need to own a printing press, or self-host a blogging platform even.
Have a twitter account? You're a journalist! Have a twitter bot that follows a bunch of local news sources? You're a newspaper! No longer do you need to own a printing press or an editorial staff. Want an "Opinion Section"? Tweet something that sparks outrage and watch angry replies pour in!
The only remaining barrier to entry is high-end investigative journalism-whistleblowing. And that's always been a tiny niche and hard to monetize.
- Keeps the 1st place winner on their toes
- Reports to the losing voters
- Can do local news
- Can talk to people
Otherwise, all those hopeful candidates go back to focusing on their living and leaving those "losing" voters without any representation (seriously, how can there be no representation for the leftover votes and assuming they're not rich).
Also, why don't we tech people lead by example and build non-profits and cooperatives that provide better software/services? See for example the successes of framasoft, sourcehut...