Getting hit by a paywall to read this article, maybe made the point better than the article!
Do you usually complain when anything else in life is not completely free?
Either it's paywalls or horrible ads+tracking. I don't know why people expect to get everything for free, just because it's on the internet. Especially something that takes time and effort to make.
PSA: you don't get to complain about "the media" if you're not even willing to pay for quality outlets
Yes, I complain about both.
Next stupid question.
Someone complains about one specific thing not being free. You:
I don’t know why people expect to get **everything **for free
Since you've started down the road of what people are and are not allowed to do: you are not allowed to participate in discussions if you can't avoid making shitty logical fallacies in your very first response.
The biggest problem with paying for journalism is that nobody wants to be subscribing to 50 different websites.
If it were easier to pay for multiple news sites at once, I'm sure more people would do it.
That's my gripe as well. I currently subscribe to 3 or 4 online news outlets, and that's probably because I work in news. I can't do more.
Still, there are services like Apple News+ and Pressreader. I wish they would do more, but I guess it's better than nothing
Normally I'm all about "yes they should be paid" but in this case it's particularly ironic - modest ads used to be able to support newspapers. Now they need paywalls.
Title of article: internet is worse
QED.
I think the thing that bugs me most is everything is a subscription. Maybe if there was an easy way to do a la carte with reasonable pricing I would be more inclined to pony up for this and that. I'm just sick of attaching a leach to my ass anytime I am curious about something.
"Modest ads" were never a thing: if you were on the internet 10-ish years ago, you'll remember that pop-up ads were everywhere.
Also, ads were never able to support newspapers, even if they used to be more lucrative. Newspapers were desperate to reach new audiences and they basically started to publish stuff at a loss. That's why media is in the situation they're in right now: underfunded and in perpetual search for new ways to monetize so they do not die altogether.
They're still tracking the crap out of you even if you pay, so they can fuck right off and die in the gutter.
uBlock Origin only shows Chartbeat and Quantcast as trackers on The Atlantic's website, so I'm gonna say you're talking out of your ass.
"They" in this case refers to media sites in general not limited to this specific one. And pretty much everone still track user behavior to do profiling on their paid users.
While it’s understandable that in the current economic systems news outlets have to make money somehow and one way is through paywalls, I think it’s also fair for people to value free access to information. Assuming that news outlets and journalists can still make a living, most people would probably agree that it’s better for everybody if the content can be accessed freely, especially since copying it and transmitting it on the internet is super cheap (particularly for text articles). This isn’t some absurd concept. Libraries are respected and valued institutions precisely because they serve a similar role, and we have the tools to do it on an even larger scale. Of course it might not be practical with how things are structured economically right now (and heck, maybe there isn’t even a better way to do it) but I think it’s fair to recognize that there’s a lot of untapped potential for sharing information, and it’d be nice if we could find a way to do it more equitably :).
The issue isn't data transmission and hosting, it's paying someone a living wage to do this work professionally, along with their editors, graphic artists, analysts, and everyone else along the way that writes the news. It's a bit absurd that people complain about ads and low quality reporting/analysis while simultaneously demanding all journalists work for free. Hell, if you get a library card you'll probably be able to legitimately access the article right now for free in a way that still pays the journalist.
Are there ads behind the paywalls? Genuine question, we I've never paid to find out. If yes, then they can ask fuck right off. You don't get to have it both ways.
it's so sad. this is going to sound pathetic, but -- i remember in high school browsing reddit and twitter and 4chan and almost getting a buzz off of it, the interactions felt so cutting-edge, funny and fresh and perfectly transient, it felt like i had a voice for the first time, able to post and have people like what i posted.
and now we're kinda just...going thru the motions and everything is worse and companies are just blindly nuking things we used to hold sacred
I hear you. When I was a teen, Internet was:
A handful of focused websites or your buddies geocities / angelfire site.
Chatting in crazy chat rooms on IRC, and having your close friends on ICQ.
Using a dial up modem to play doom, Warcraft 2, red alert, duke nukem, quake, StarCraft, total annihilation.. etc.
Those were fun times. Felt like the bleeding edge of tech.. hiding out and having fun in places people haven't even heard of.
I know there is truth in that the internet I worse.
But I do wonder how much of our feeling that is worse is more based on the glamor of youth and nostalgia.
I think there’s some of this, but I do honestly believe the internet has fundamentally changed and the makeup of it is a lot different. This isn’t all bad, but there’s a lot of things that we’ve lost now that the internet has become more centralized and corporate in general. At least proportionally I think there’s far fewer passion project websites and a lot of people gather on big websites instead, and there’s fewer communities that are strictly about a niche topic. In some sense this is good because things are generally more accessible to the average person, but I feel like the niche weirdos have been drowned out a bit in the eternal September, and there’s something a little sad about that too!
Imagine needing proof of something so basic that you could see it just being being online over the past decade, if not decade and a half.
Not everyone is old enough to know the difference. Imagine being 20. What frame of reference do you have?
Sometimes people think they know the obvious answer and they turn out to be wrong. It's good to have clear evidence of what is going on.
In recent years, it’s been harder to love the internet, a miracle of connectivity that feels ever more bloated, stagnant, commercialized, and junkified. We are just now starting to understand the specifics of this transformation—the true influence of Silicon Valley’s vise grip on our lives. It turns out that the slow rot we might feel isn’t just in our heads, after all.
☹️
The Internet is getting more decentralized, with better alternatives for big corporate services
it's it though?
in our Fediverse bubble yes.
but so many average people just don't care.
They care, they just don't know about the alternatives, and most don't have the time or knowledge to research them, especially with the biggest companies doing their best to mystify technology as a whole, and reduce user experience to a carefully cultivated all inclusive proprietary prison
They care in the sense that they want [Facebook|Youtube|Twitter|Instagram] without the enshittification. When told about alternatives with some promise that aren't exactly that, they often don't have the mental energy to explore.
Its much more than "the internet is worse". Everything technology is worse, can't have nice things.
I have a microwave/air fryer/convection combo that I can't use unless I install a phone app. It came with the apartment. It has only a few "buttons" on its face. The UI is almost completely non-intuitive, but the app makes it easy. Every time I bake bread I fight the urge to blow my brains out as I navigate to the app. I have become that which I mocked.
I yearn for the days when my toaster just made toast.
There's a line that needs to be drawn between things that benefit from IoT and things that should've remained dumb
It turns outcapitalism is great for maximising profits, but terrible for consumers, and demanding open-source products is the only way out of this hell-hole
Maybe it's time to regulate the fuck out of the internet.
Here's the proof: vaguely motions in the general direction of everything
This is the Internet. We don't need proof.
I mean I'm on board with the generality, but looking up the original article it looks like was was taken down, stating:
EDITOR’S NOTE 10/6/2023: After careful review of the op-ed, "How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet," and relevant material provided to us following its publication, WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed.
Apologies for the disgusting timestamp. I'm quoting.
It could be I'm missing something though since I can't see the whole article. It sounded like the Wired article was the basis for this one by The Atlantic.
> have proof that internet is worse
> requires subscription to read
There you have it, boys!
The internet isn't worse, it's just the web. The Internet is much better actually:
There are more subsea cables with more capacity, the Internet is meshed better these days. Losing any single subsea cable doesn't have as much of an impact as it used to.
Additionally you don't need to cache stuff with reverse proxies in each AS anymore because long distance transmission has gotten way cheaper, and more available.
The last mile issues are also solved, though for now only in densly populated areas in advanced economies. With fiber connections to individual dwellings you get scaling that's infinite for practical purposes. This also means you can have a gigabit connection end to end without bloating buffers on DSL or DOCSIS modems.
Worse than what?
Than it was.
Not just nostalgia tinted glasses, it really was better in the earlier years.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
