Facebook confirms it will drop news sharing in Canada under bill C-18

From the perspective of Facebook, Reddit and Twitter, they can just replace CNN and Fox News with Jacobin and Breitbart and nobody will care that much except people who work for those outlets. In fact, most people will probably be happier to have sources that care less about pretending to be "objective" and just support their party's agenda (such outlets were successfully outcompeting corporate media on the social platforms before the circa 2017 algorithm changes).

In other words, the corporate media should be careful what they wish for because they might lose the fantastic gift horse they got from "big tech" 6 years ago. The value of a media outlet is in its influence over public opinion not its profitability and this greed driven proposal is a good way for corporate media to burn down their own influence.

This is how people have always read the news. In the old days, there was TV and radio news, which are really just headlines and a brief summary of stories, and newspapers. Most people didn't read the majority of the stories in the newspapers -- they'd skim the headlines, maybe read the first paragraph of a few, and read one or two of the stories that particularly interested them.

That's what's hard to monetize online. I have no answers for this problem, but it's certainly a problem.

The news media needs to put up strong paywalls and give up on full subscriptions. No one wants to pay $100 per news source to access hundreds of articles they don't want to read. They need to let people pay per article. Paying one article at a time is too expensive due to transaction fees. They need to offer something like 40 articles for $20 and request another payment when the 40 articles run out.

The news media needs social media to spread their article links around. Charging social media per click will result in their article links being reduced or blocked because of the cost. News media with lower cost links will be promoted.

Does society want to subsidize mostly clickbait journalism and incentivize creators to predominantly write articles that will be shared widely? Or if society wants to subsidize news beyond headlines, might there be other content they would prefer is subsidized?

I'm certainly not going to subscribe to every service out there to get a variety of news, because it's cost prohibitive, and yet I'd like a variety, because high-quality content is so spread out. What I want, and what I suspect several others want, either isn't available or isn't easy to discover.

Consider the following:

There's a store giving away "free" coffee, if you agree to have your photo taken and shared publically on social media. And you agree to sign up to their mailing list. And, in the very fine print, you implicitly agree to have your contact info shared with other companies for the purposes of direct marketing. (Of course, you can opt out of the mailing list after you receive your first email... but as for the other companies that now also have your email address, well then it's not so clear. I suppose you'll just have to deal with those, individually, over the course of the weeks/months/years that you receive (and try to opt out of) their marketing barrage.) But hey, free coffee, right?

Next to that store is another coffee shop. This store charges $1.75 for a rather plain, unmarked cup of surprisingly adequate coffee. The store has a tip jar on the counter that's clearly labeled as going towards supporting the local kids' hockey team. (Does it actually go there? Who knows. But people report feeling good dropping loose change in there once in a while, and that's sufficient.) The store clerk knows the regular patrons by name, and the staff tend to "source locally" (not just their materials, but even for their part-time and student help during peak seasons). They're small. They're struggling. And thanks to the "free shop" next door, there's even talk of raising their prices to $2/cup for a small.

Given that scenario, will people choose the "free" coffee? You bet your ass they will. But know these 2 things: there will still be a sizable portion of folks that, given the above scenario, would STILL choose to pay for a product if they knew the "warm fuzzy benefits" that came along for the ride. In other words: money isn't everything. The 2nd thing to note is that, after a while (perhaps, after being sufficiently educated? Or just being tired of treated like a product themselves?) there will be folks who jump ship from the "free store" in search of a more sustainable and ethical alternative. I suppose it might happen in the other direction as well (people leaving the pay shop in order to get free coffee next door) but I hope by now you can understand WHY someone would want to pay a nominal fee for something that is apparently "free" somewhere else.

Is Canadian news so superior that a significant portion users who were previously content with Facebook's news feed will become so dissatisfied with it that they'll leave?

Maybe we have too many news outlets - you can even read that some employ AI already to write articles for them. They are going for quantity over quality.

There are always going to be people wanting to gossip over a headline and if a news source doesn't provide much beyond that, are they actually providing anything of value?

When we didn't have internet, many people would have looked at newspapers on display and discussed headlines without actually buying a newspaper. Was it a problem then?

These organic posts/shares likely have significantly better CTR better than a similarly formatted ad, as they would have a "Sally likes this..." header.

sucks to get old

For example, when I bought my home 5 years it came with a Washer and Dyer in the basement, these were not high end units, and I fully expected to need to replace them. However getting large appliances out of my basement is a pain in the ass, so 2 years ago when the dryer broke I was faced with having to get it out of the basement.

You know what I did instead, I watched a YT video, bought a rebuild kit on Amazon and spent a Sunday afternoon fixing it myself. Cost me about 5 hours of time, and $75 in parts. Been working fine since.

In the "old days" the expense of the item required them to be repaired as a large appliance would be a big purchase. Today because of the efficiency and automation in modern manufacturing the cost of a large appliance may be higher in real terms, if you looked at it from something like "per hour of average labor to buy" it is very cheap, to the point that paying a repair person to spend 2 hours + $75 in parts to fix my dryer likely exceeds the cost of just buying a new one down at Lowes.

In the end I dont know of quality has dropped or if things have just gotten cheaper to make....

Same with news... Information used to be very expensive to disseminate. Printing Press, Books, etc. as Technology has increased the cost to disseminate has dropped to the point where information flow is basically free today.

Murdoch owns 2/3rds of all news media here. His headlines ensured the centre-right election victory in 2011 which was terrible for many reasons.

That government then cancelled our already in-progress national fibre broadband rollout in favour of inferior VDSL2, because (at the time) higher bandwidth was seen as a threat to cable TV. This was a multi-billion dollar waste of taxpayer money, and we now have the ~70th worst internet in the world for the ~10th highest price.

Have a guess who owns the cable TV networks.