I don't think I will read anything else this insightful today. Would I pay for this thread? Absolutely. Would I pay $19.99/month for HNPREMIUM where I could read "the full thread" of top content providers like mjburgess? Nope.
I am posting here because its free for you. I'm posting here to participate in an open forum, I am donating my time to the people here, in conversation -- not to HackerNews itself. Which has my loyalty only insofar as it is the "public space I want to visit".
So if you were to have paid anything for that thread, I wouldnt have started it.
And likewise I have never posted to any internet forum behind a paywall and I find the idea practically and morally suspicious. All the places worth going to are run by those with a passion for them -- it is that passion which they want to share.
I'm quite capitalist myself, but for my own passions, an elite socialist -- that is, of course the value to me ought be non-financial; and likewise, to you.
A kind of "collective elite" is very intuitive for one's owns passions --- but it wont get you an economy.
But I dont wish to turn my thoughts into an economy. My words pay their own way.
Storage, compute, and bandwidth all cost money, and it has to come from somewhere.
Your mindset of "everything costs money and so everyone is the internet's paypig" is broken and exemplifies the problem with the modern internet.
Yes, everything costs money, but honestly, not that much money. $20-$40 a month is enough to run your own kbin/lemmy/mastodon instance on a VPS with your own domain name and everything. If you have 300 regular users, getting them to throw $500 a year in support at your site is nothing.
Also, if you occupy a niche and run it well, you can make internet money the old fashioned way, by finding products that your niche users specifically want and organically selling to them without ad spamming them to death.
Yes, that means money changes hands. That's capitalism. But in that system the site users are not being spammed with annoying ads and the only tracking being done is with the interest category itself and not on a per user basis including all of the other sites they've ever visited before visiting your site.
Just like forums used to do.
Sure, forums are outdated because the site navigation is clunky and user participation is difficult, but federated systems can bridge the gap between the forum based glory days and the modern interface without costing everyone so much money that it boggles the mind.
Yes, that's usually how it starts. It ends with invisible tracking pixels and flashing X10 ads everywhere. That or stealth ads disguised as content.
This isn't some hypothetical. We have 30 years of history now to tell us exactly how this plays out.
> Just like forums used to do.
That era was great while it lasted. But since the "adpocalypse", it's very very difficult for sites to make money without targeted ads and the requisite tracking. We lost a lot of high-quality sites like Dr Dobbs Journal in the adpocalypse, and all we have to replace them are SEO content farms and blogspam.
Despite that, I think ads will probably evolve to fit the new ecosystem, where two people like you and me are having a conversation and I will at an appropriate time and with a proper amount of discretion mention (shiny new toy) and that (I'm enjoying it) and then move on.
Annoying, blaring in your face spite ads and out of place porn ads will change, the new ads will be powered by AI personas that match their online spaces, have appropriate day night cycles and backstories, and will be practically indistinguishable from real live humans and they will occasionally gather together and talk excitedly with each other about (shiny new toy) or how (Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs' new birthday cake cereal recipe) is (awesome) and then us real human will stumble onto that conversation (without the parenthesis), leaving us to wonder if we should give them a try.
And if someone were to offer me thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue to host a site that seems hustling and bustling with activity that is appropriate for the space where sometimes people will be urged to get into flame wars about how (Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs' new birthday cake cereal recipe) is (Better than / not as good as) (Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs' Original recipe), thus preventing any conversation about (Plain old Oatmeal for breakfast) then who wouldn't take that?
In reality, we've got several options. People have house parties. One or several members of the community volunteer property they already own and maintain for another purpose to be temporarily used as a gathering place. The web analogy would be if we all had our own private blogs that we ran on self-hosted servers and we moved from the comments section of one to another and had our discussions there. Classically, Usenet was basically this but without the web.
Commons exist. These would be something like a park. That can be funded via taxes, or if you're militantly anti-government, via some more voluntary form of communal funding, like an HOA or a non-profit that accepts donations. The web equivalent of the latter would be something like Wikipedia, which could easily host threaded discussions if they wanted to. It's arguably a problem that nothing like the former really exists. A lot of people in the past several years have been saying platforms like Twitter deserve to be treated as equivalent to government-provided commons, so why not just have them actually owned and funded by the government? Ironically, the US government does own and operate a classified Twitter clone called eChirp, but nobody from the web can access it unless they have a JWICS account, workstation access, a security clearance, and IC PKI identity.
When thought about this way, do private for-profit parks exist? I know amusement parks exist, but they are clearly different. The value there isn't in going to see the other park guests who you know and would gather with anyway. The park itself is the attraction, filled with entertaining rides, shows, and restaurants that play off of brand loyalty and nostalgia. It feel like places like Facebook and Reddit want to make the same or even money compared to Disney, but without putting in the century of work to build a brand and back-catalog of high-quality entertainment franchises. So they rely on users to generate content instead and it's at best a shitty, ephemeral attention grab that nobody will look back on in 2120 and cherish.
What many of us want are parks, public parks with funding models, not amusement parks with business models, let alone shitty copycats of amusement parks where all the rides suck, but we go anyway because our friends are there and we have no regular parks to hang out at.
The parent commenter you're replying to here is effectively proposing I should get paid to hang out with my friends. I don't want to get paid to hang out with my friends. As soon as that happens, they're not friends. They're customers and I just became a business. I don't want to be a business. I'm just trying to talk, not generate monetizable content.
Indeed, and so I say: I would never have written anything at all if they had had to pay for it.
Is it because people will genuinely engage with that content there?
Is it a “this is such good content I’ve captured it for posterity - look here’s the proof!” type of endorsement?
Or is it an attempt to archive the content into some sort of collective memory? Or an aide memoire for your own purposes?
Genuinely curious to understand your motivation, it’s not a criticism of what you’ve done, just something I feel I don’t understand.
So that was easier or more impactful to communicate via image than typing “this thread is valuable”
At least that’s how it made sense to me
edit: also I use greenshot so it's too easy for me to screenshot and get an imgur-link. And yes, I'm a screenshoter, sending my colleagues images of text all the time. I'm lucky to be alive still.
edit2: example, slack dm from 1 hour ago https://i.imgur.com/807OQML.png
Just click on the timestamp next to the comment, like "12 hours ago".
Sending the actual HN url to a comment or thread, instead of a screenshot:
* Is accessible to people with limited vision who can't or can't as easily read a screeshot. Many people even without vision impairment find text much easier to consume than a photo of text. For instance, text in reasonable CSS will flow to fit your screensize, where a screenshot will not.
* For those interested, easily provides the context of where the comment/thread appeared and what's around it, hard to trace back from a screenshot to HN
* For the future archival purposes, is often more likely to still be good than a link to a third-party image hosting site
* In the rare case where it matters, is "self-authenticating", it points to HN itself, while an image can be modified or faked, although certainly in most cases there is no motivation for someone to do so, still it's nice to have it built in.
When it's an HN comment, or anything else with a URL, I think it should be nearly as easy to show people what you're refering to with a URL to it, as it is with a screenshot?