Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

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    People made content because they wanted to, and it 
    was generally better quality than the corporate 
    blogspam we have now.

I miss the old days too. And even now that independently-made, non-ad-supported content is what I prefer most. Spent a lot of years creating it myself.

But let's not be naive. Not all art or journalism can be created that way.

There is a lot of stuff that just doesn't happen unless somebody is working on it full-time. And since people need money to live, the people making that stuff need money.

For example, imagine the sorts of investigative journalism where somebody might spend months or years researching a story. One that might not even pan out. That's not something you can realistically do, part-time, for free, while earning a living doing something else as your day job.

Expecting everything to be free, and also ad-free, because it was created by some hobbyist in their spare time while they do something else for a living severely restricts the amount of people who can create and the types of things that can be created.

> And since people need money to live, the people making that stuff need money.

Yes, but I believe advertising is a poor solution for that. Because it seems to tend to lead to optimizing for advertising at the expense of quality.

I believe crowdfunding is a better solution for a couple reasons.

1. Enough people want the thing to be made to be willing to front the cost for it (contrast this with advertising-funded journalism, much of which is just a constant barrage of noise rather than it all being something someone's passionate enough about making to pitch).

2. Over time, creators develop reputations for good or ill, and this enables trustworthy creators to start to bank on their reputation for future, perhaps riskier projects, while making it harder for untrustworthy creators to continue practicing.

3. Related to point 2, over time this optimizes for delivery of quality output (which is the most important way this is better than advertising, IMO). It does require quality pitches as well to convince people to front the money for the effort, but if you deliver a quality pitch and bail on the output, your reputation takes a nosedive.

Crowd funding is a complete failure. Look at any high quality project or content used by hundreds of thousands and they will have a dozen people donating if any. Charging for content access is the only way, freeloaders can be left behind.

> Charging for content access is the only way, freeloaders can be left behind.

Newspaper publishers were slow to pick up on the free www. Until they did, all we needed was a dialup connection, and we could go anywhere, serve anything, and talk to anyone.

I'm not sure what broke the dam, but it might have been when browsers started behaving according to some kind of documented standard.

Then adblockers came, and the publishers started pushing nag modals.

Then publishers decided to try to run ads as well as paywalls; yeah, suckers, pay us to watch our ads!

I regret the passing of an internet that was free to use, give or take a connection. They did steal it.

    I regret the passing of an internet that was free to 
    use, give or take a connection. They did steal it.

That's when I fell in love with the potential of the www/internet and switched career paths.

But in hindsight that was never really going to last. When the guts of the public www (browsers, servers, data pipes, protocols, TCP/IP support in operating systems) were being built out in the 90s, it was all predicated on the belief that it was the future of commerce.

Without that explosion, "the free internet" probably would have just been a slightly evolved version of the dial-up BBS scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Which is cool, and honestly depending on my mood I might be willing to trade 2023's technology hellscape for that simpler time.

Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning)

There are studies where money ruins altruism and pure joy of creating sthg. has to be replaced with a payment which becomes according to Herzberg a hygiene factor and wears out.

The --internet-- www as we know it - give it back!

> Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning)

but it eventually had paid sponsorships from companies that make money off it.

Linux is a VERY different thing than investigative journalism. I can't think of a single bit of investigative journalism someone did as a side project that has spawned an entire industry, but maybe I'm not thinking hard enough.

Content costs money to make. Yes, sometimes give via self-funding of the content (without advertisement, like by working a job), and that's fantastic. But we also need a way to support the content that we like, and we can't expect everyone to be able to give.

> Content costs money to make

Some content costs money, other content - and how I dislike the word 'content' which turns that which makes the 'net interesting inside-out to make it into a money-making scheme - costs time to make. Not all time is money, lots of it is time spent on activities which people do without the need for payment since they enjoy it. Call it a 'hobby' or 'pastime' if you want, something to do when you're free to do what you want. Some people like to go and watch sports games, others like to sit on the sofa and watch televised drivel while others park themselves in front of a computer to create something. Much of what is created is interesting only to the creator for the act of creation but some of it has value beyond the experience of the creator. That is indeed how the Linux kernel got started, it is how a lot of music is made, artwork is created and more.

> I can't think of a single bit of investigative journalism someone did as a side project that has spawned an entire industry

Maybe not an entire industry, but Bellingcat has been impactful and it started with a guy commenting on the guardian comments section.

Investigative journalism, (the media), sometimes referred to as "The Fourth Estate", is too important to be funded by advertising, and should be funded by the people, and be for the people. Just like the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of our governments.

Survivorship bias?

>Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning)

Red Hat started in 1993 and SUSE in 1994. So you got 2 whole years before money entered the picture.

In the early years, these companies were tiny, struggled to not go out of business.

And because they were so small, they contributed very little paid time... anywhere.

Linux happened for free.

Yes, Linux was started for free as a student project, but the reason why it became the standard choice for data centers is because large corporations like Oracle, IBM and later Google united behind it in order to stop Microsoft from dominating servers. These corporations along with some commercial distributions have been funding Linux development for decades. Linux as we know it today is a child of corporate strategic thinking.

IBM, DEC, Sun, HP and others already had commercial Unix offerings with support that corporate users wanted for servers. Why unite behind Linux, which at the time was inferior to all those others?

To attack Windows from the top and bottom simultaneously. It may seem excessive but MS was in a very strong position at the time. Many of us wondered if anything else would survive.

I'm not against Red Hat but the sentiment that they are ruining Linux is not that uncommon.

I believe “you create for free and live poor” vs. “you need to monetize your work via ads” is definitely the wrong dichotomy.

You can simply create out of inspiration, while having a job that pays your bills (that is actually how a lot of OSS happened). Or you could publish some work openly, while suggesting the reader to buy your book, for example.

Over-reliance on ad-based model and the resulting prevalence of double-sided “social” platforms where the advertiser is the customer, actual user needs count for nothing because no one will leave and no honest competitor can compete with “free”, most certainly seems to me to be at the root of a lot of dysfunction—if these platforms make more money from engagement thanks to aggravating inflammatory posts, regardless of whether they are well informed or in good faith, then that’s what they will promote and reward one way or another.

The expectation of “free” is part of the problem, sure, but I don’t think that’s the cause. The cause can probably be distilled to “abuse of information asymmetry in free market enabled by regulatory inaction” (free market is great, but in presence of malicious actors it needs some regulation or it stops working). That leads to the aforementioned platforms, then the expectation of “free” and non-appreciation of work published completely for free just out of altruism or to feel pride/recognition, and generally goes counter to how the market is supposed to work.

It's primarily a cultural difference.

In print media ads were fairly tame. They weren't personally targeted and in some contexts they were quite welcome.

Although print magazines made most of their money by selling ad pages, the content was largely firewalled. (Byte is a good example. The content was always hacker culture not ad culture.)

On the internet, ad culture - not just ads themselves - has consumed everything. Whether it's a YouTube channel owner reminding everyone to like-and-subscribe, or some TikTok nonsense desperately trying to go viral, it's mostly about reach - defined entirely by potential ad spend - and not about the content, which is almost incidental to monetisation.

And that's why it's so noisy, and often trivial.

In fact I suspect there's a general Gresham's Law principle of cultural systems. As access and delivery become cheaper, content becomes noisier, more trivial, and less culturally valuable. As we go from manual content generation to automated AI content reach will increase, but cultural value - in the sense of challenging, original ideas and experiences that have lasting widespread relevance - will decrease even further.

Open source is by volunteers if you count it by volume. But probably not if you count by impact. Especially not if you include all the accompanying things like maintenance, packing and running software.

I think what is lacking from open source is reciprocity. Traditional copyright is extreme in that it reserve almost all rights. Open source is extreme in that is reserve almost no rights. The result is the same, the middle men gets all the power.

It isn't going to happen though. Because what is going to happen already is and it isn't that.

> Open source is extreme in that is reserve almost no rights.

There are copyleft licenses which can encourage reciprocity.

I suspect Copilot and related tech pose more danger, they basically allow to sidestep licensing altogether even as they return 1:1 training data in some cases. Hopefully a lawsuit against Microsoft comes in due time.

> Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning)

Linux happened mostly through the contributions of the paid developers of the Linux foundation. And still the majority of the commits belong to those developers. And it was possible to do so because the foundation received enough support from major donors, most of which were corporations. If you would want to choose an Open Source success story that wasnt backed by corporations, WordPress would be what you are looking for. But even then, the WordPress ecosystem found a way to fund itself directly through its users. Which means that they are also funded. In contrast, a gigantic amount of Open Source projects were abandoned when its contributors were no longer able to maintain them because life responsibilities started raining on them...

Unfortunately any social paradigm, movement or setup must be able to sustain itself economically. The best way to do it is to do it through its users, directly, so that concentrated capital wont be able to take it over.

Linux is the exception that proves the rule.

While it is completely free (beer + libre), Google and Facebook exploited numerous Linux-related technologies to turn the internet into a planet-scale ad machine.

I apologise for my pedantry, but:

> the exception that proves the rule

To prove the rule is to test the rule; proof spirit is spirit that passes the test, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The exception that proves the rule is the exception that violates it (and shows that the rule is a heuristic, not a law).

>And since people need money to live

And now we're getting to the actual root of the problem.

If you make it so people don't need money to live, they'll invent a new currency. People are hardwired to barter.

That's not even remotely true. Nothing about us is inherent to bartering.

That's of course relying on the assumption that we would get rid of money entirely as the only solution.

Bartering is an offshoot of "fairness". Even dogs, crows get upset, if treated unfairly.

There are experiments where giving desired treats, unfairly, causes these animals(monkeys too), to exhibit outrage. EG, giving some to one animal, and less desirable treats to another.

Bartering is an offshoot of "being fair". I "worked" to make this thing, but now I need a thing you have. You worked for it. Each of us spent time, effort, work, but how much, who spent more? We negotiate. We settle.

This is bartering. And at the root of this, is fairness.

And even animals, inherently, know this.

Right. Tax, whether to a government, or to an employer, is the beginnings of unfairness. Taxes can be used for fairness (enforced savings for everyone for the winter), and as a form of barter (military protection), but the value gained by singular authorities makes things disproportionately unfair.

I guess maybe the taxation is not the problem, it's the centralization of the taxed wealth to particular figures in the government (nobles) or corporations (shareholders and executives).

> giving desired treats, unfairly, causes these animals(monkeys too), to exhibit outrage

This mechanism might stem from offspring times when they were receiving food/care from parents. I wouldn't connect it with barter, as these species do not exchange any goods.

You don't have to go all the way back in time to the root to reach the point where it cost so much less to live, that things which were within reach for the ambitious individual are now out of the question due to the exorbitant cost of living itself today by comparison.

Which is exactly why it costs so much to live. That is how markets work, by allocating opportunities to those with the most money.

I think doing journalism part time for free is how bellingcat started.

> There is a lot of stuff that just doesn't happen unless somebody is working on it full-time. And since people need money to live, the people making that stuff need money.

I definitely agree. And even for people doing it solo as a full-time job (email newsletters come to mind), the quality tends to be less than what would be possible if they had even one other person sharing the work.

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