Universal basic income, as an example, makes debates like this irrelevant. There may be other ways to run things that also make these arguments look like the anachronism they ought to be.
I believe a world with 99% less advertising is not only possible, but necessary.
And I believe a world where creators can create, without having to sell their souls, is not only possible but necessary.
And we best make that world manifest fast, before our window closes.
Some types of reporting I would be happy to fund and wait for but other stories need to be posted ASAP or they lose their value.
The same is true of art. For example, Age of Empires getting an expansion 25 years later is notable because it is uncommon. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/02/age-of-empires-2-gets...
People will gladly buy physical books off you, but they won't pay for articles. There seems to be a mental barrier between those two. A physical book in your hand probably feels more real, though the total amount of work isn't that different (to a series of articles).
LOL at that, you're right.
When it comes to content online, we live in an era of total abundance. This is the sort of abundance that used to be considered utopian. You will literally never run out of excellent texts for free, a mere human just cannot read them fast enough. Same with videos, games etc.
But that abundance has significant downsides for the people who create all that content. Competing with free stuff is a task for Sisyphos.
The problem now isn't scarcity of content. It's signal vs noise.
As a consumer of content what we want is content specifically relevant and valuable to us, but there is too much noise most of the time. As a producer of content we want to is to be able to capture some of that value. For example if there was a source of content that have me an advantage in some domain area I work on, I would absolutely pay for it. (And in fact I do, like chatgpt plus).
For entertainment content there's probably enough free stuff that most people don't care to pay.
I've been working on a platform called Sociables (https://www.sociables.com/) that gives content creators a place to offer their community as a part of their product offering. The difference between Patreon is it is much more focused on allowing creators to set up a place for their community to interact with each other instead of the more para-social style relationship seen on Patreon.