It’s a pretty scathing omen for the ad run internet that this is the part that shuts down while their flaming dumpsterfire of a content mill lives on.
On an individual to individual basis we might recognize bad content meant to feed off of our base emotional instincts versus content meant for accuracy and to inform.
However collectively it appears there's more of us that rather get sucked into the rage content than try for objective or accurate reporting.
This mirrors the transition of television News from not needed to be profitable to needing to be profitable. Look at the success of cable news.
I think this is less of a comment about us as a species and more a comment about the economic systems that we have in place. Our economic systems used to support journalism.
We ought to exercise what agency we have in shaping social systems, but not only this, we need to remind ourselves regularly that we do have agency in order to exercise it
Why would someone choose to wade through a listicle when they can get their rage unfiltered and on tap?
The main change is that web media seems far more comfortable than traditional with being _just_ fluff, so the journalism is increasingly endangered.
What is the alternative? And I do mean an alternative that would incentivize and yield the same creative explosion we've seen with the web over the last 30 years.
This wouldn't have happened without ads, no other alternative has ever been found that got the author of a website paid while not directly charging the reader.
The web with ads is immensely more useful than the web without, hell without ads there probably wouldn't even be a search engine to find anything on the web and without a search engine nobody would be able to find anything of any use.
All? That's such a ridiculous generalization that it's practically a lie. If that's all you remember, then I suggest that your experience has been too short and/or limited. Before Google even existed there were tons of sites that were there for reasons other than ads. (I've been involved with the internet since before it became public BTW, plus Usenet and other things before that, so I have some perspective.) Even after Google became the ad behemoth it is today, plenty of sites flourished while having nothing to do with it. I had my own blog from 2000 until last year, moderately well known in some circles, but neither I nor most of the other bloggers I interacted with had anything to do with ads. There were forums without ads, e-commerce sites without ads (not counting their own), etc. The current situation, where everything seems to be a walled garden or infested with ads, is pretty recent ... and even now, there are plenty of sites that decline to play that game. Like the one we're having this conversation on.
And I re-iterate, whatever and however many sites there were knocking around on the early internet pale in comparison to the breadth of sites and information that came onto the web fueled by ads when people realised they could fund their hobbies and write about topics they loved at the same time.
It's really very simple, if you can literally get paid to write on your website, you will write more. You will hire people to write with you. This is common sense and it will vastly outpace the output of the contingent who simply wish to write for the sake of it.
Ads supercharged the webs development and I see nothing that could've replaced them, I say that as someone who's never been involved in the ad industry.
Confuse correlation with causation much? The internet has certainly grown, but not just because of ads. In some ways it has shrunk because of ads. Innumerable forums and blogs and even social-media sites like MySpace were shunted aside as VC- and ad-funded walled gardens like Facebook became dominant. That's a loss (and I say that as someone who worked at Facebook for a while). As I said, the volume has increased but the creativity hasn't. I'll take ten truly creative people over a hundred YouTube or TikTok "influencer" types any day.
> if you can literally get paid to write on your website, you will write more. You will hire people to write with you. This is common sense
It makes me sad when I see people who can't even imagine a motive other than profit. Seems particularly common here, and I've learned not to engage with such. Have a nice day.
And most of what people write in order to get ad revenue is pure garbage. And even the stuff that isn't garbage is constrained by what advertisers approve of.
You're not going back far enough. The heyday for the web predated Google.
> The web with ads is immensely more useful than the web without
This does not at all comport with what I've experienced.
For anyone that has trouble imagining what I could possibly be talking about, there are some examples discussed here [1], from which I highlight a handful of bullet points, which may not all be mutually exclusive:
- financial stability
- the need to "chase the algorithm"
- sensationalism as a perverse incentive of the market
- a lack of incentivization of quality content
- the perverse disincentivization of long-form content
- the perverse incentivization of cheap editorial content over expensive investigative journalism
- the availability of quality information to people who can't afford to pay for an expensive news subscription or who may simply not have access to news where they are
- editorial independence from commercial or industrial interests
- long-term viability of more local news
- collapsing advertising revenue due to macro, social and tech trends
- parasitic audience capture by social media platforms
[1] https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_developme...
You have to think a little harder than "where the funding comes from" (yes that's important, everyone knows it's important to follow the money... but it's not the full picture). Sophisticated administrative structures can insulate you against certain risks by altering how power is normally or naturally distributed. When you design these systems, you create the accountability mechanisms that you want: almost anything is possible.
Similarly, when issues come up with existing structures, the answer doesn't have to be an ideological pole (in whichever direction). The most reasonable answer is usually just to tweak the administrative structures / accountability mechanisms. In other words, you don't have to try and reason about this in purely theoretical, vague terms: it's a very practical and concrete problem that can have as much context and nuance as you want.
That doesn't mean it's easy, but I hate that almost everyone seems to not even spend a minute being creative. Similarly, I hate how people confuse the issue of "is the media free to editorialize" with "do I agree with this piece of editorial content", which is >90% of the criticism I seem to see in general.
We need to destroy ads as a viable business model before we can even try exploring other models. Installing an ad blocker is ethical.
I suspect this dynamic also applies to software, including, perhaps counterintuitively, FOSS software. "Free" (but ad-supported) competes for attention with both paid and free (actually free). Interest in developing FOSS is lower, I would wager, when interest in using FOSS is lower, so we likely get less and worse FOSS in a world with lots of ad-supported (mostly spyware) software, than one without it.
people who contribute want to know the thoughts and insights of others, so comment!
It's unfortunate the internet went this way, but as you said, it happened because people "wanted" it to.
Oh. Well.
Most of those old IRC networks ended in .edu, as a good example. We never really paid for what we got on the internet, it just switched from an "under the table" scam off of universities to ad-supported.
What creative explosion? Trash news sites, social media? The world would be a better place without any of these.