51–60 of 132 posts
We need the spotify of media, where journalists are paid directly from their readers maybe an aportioned rev share model. People who want articles about the kardashians still get them and people who want to read about conflict in the middle east get theirs. No more editorializing based on the current trendy group think, no more editorializing based on what their rich billionaire owner thinks their next crusade is. Th…
I think funding mass media is less interesting than finding a way to have sustainable investigative journalism, both at the local and national levels. Investigative journalism, especially at the local level, has been hit hard by local newspapers getting shut down and the media forced to either pull out of unprofitable areas or focus on money-making ventures. Most media outlets are not the New York Times or Washington…
An idea for mixing AI with healthcare, using Tensor Flow with a huge image database of skin conditions so the user takes a pic on a phone and it determines the illness and the cure.
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I don't see "spotify of media" really solving the problem with low-quality mass media. A subscription with pay-per-view revenue share cuts out advertisers as the money middle man, but it still rewards clickbait headlines and easy to consume top lists over deep investigative journalism. The core problem (or "problem"?) of journalism today is that what people actually want to read is very different from what is "good f…
The reason why it solves clickbait vs investigative journalism is because its an apportioned revenue share. click bait is easy to write and has more competition if a user reads loads of clickbait the revenue the author makes from that user will be low per article. On the other hand if you have a user who reads "investigative" high brow content its more expensive so there is less of it so you would expect the per user…
How do we decide that "high quality" content gets more per view than "low quality" content? We would need a human who makes subsidy decisions. Or if it's just an equal split of each user's monthly payment, then:
* I'm not sure that readers of "high quality" content read fewer articles in total,
* I'm not sure that they completely avoid clickbait, maybe just read a bit of "high quality" in addition to the "low quality" ones. Often I just read comments on HN or browse pictures on reddit instead of a long thoughtful article, because after a long day of work that feels more relaxing,
* The number of people who click on those articles is still going to be a small fraction of the whole population.
So, this can finance a small number of national or even global sites with sufficient readership. Just like the Economist, New York Times, Washington Post, etc still survive on advertising revenue today.
But how do we make sure every small 20k population town weekly paper can afford similar articles on local issues? How do we encourage or guide people to actually read them instead of looking pictures of cats? How do we make a "good for you classical music collective" get paid 10x more than Nirvana when everyone wants to listen to Nirvana?
I think funding mass media is less interesting than finding a way to have sustainable investigative journalism, both at the local and national levels. Investigative journalism, especially at the local level, has been hit hard by local newspapers getting shut down and the media forced to either pull out of unprofitable areas or focus on money-making ventures. Most media outlets are not the New York Times or Washington…
I can only see tax dollars funding this approach - the BBC is the clear up on a pedestal example of this, and sometimes you have to say, the market sucks at fixing some issues.
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I agree that it's harder to solve a problem that you're not experiencing, but, by the same token, underserved communities will tolerate an even lower threshold of quality as long as you're helping them :) For the approach on how to solve their problems, the main goal is empathy. Look at the Design Thinking theory: first step is to emphatize. When I was taking a marketing course, they told us to shadow a consumer. You…
Empathy might help you find and understand their problems; the problem seems to be how to finance the solution. When selling to a well-to-do middle-class professional, you're probably competing for cash that would otherwise go to purchase some toy or extra night out. When selling to the working-class, you're often competing against rent and food. Essentially, how to sell to someone who has no discretionary income?
I am also an advocate of internet privacy and against big companies selling my data to 3rd parties, but I believe a trade off is needed here.
Google and Facebook are free, but they sell your data to advertisers and 3rd parties in exchange for your usage, I would imagine that a startup that caters to those without discretionary income would need a similar business model, at least in the early stages.
We need the spotify of media, where journalists are paid directly from their readers maybe an aportioned rev share model. People who want articles about the kardashians still get them and people who want to read about conflict in the middle east get theirs. No more editorializing based on the current trendy group think, no more editorializing based on what their rich billionaire owner thinks their next crusade is. Th…
Check out Blendle. It's pay-per-article news from all the big sources. NYTimes, WSJ, WaPo, Economist, etc. I use it a lot, paying between $0.09 and $0.59 per article. And at the bottom of each one is a "refund" button that's no questions asked.
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> Most techies aren't also veterans or single mothers Hire them. They're cash strapped and need money. You're knowledge strapped and need insight. There's bound to be a way to make those two facts work together so it benefits both parties.
Good luck finding them - most of us go to inland state schools and fly under the prestige of the likes of Stanford and UC Berkeley. EDIT - For clarity, I'm a veteran graduate of a state school.
I've constantly racked my brain on the Underserved Communities and Social Services: my dad is a Vietnam vet and my mom (while we were growing up) fit that single mother middle-class type...how does technology help them? Part of the problem is they aren't tech savvy the way the HN community is - so what works for our community doesn't exactly work for theirs, or that they even use technology to the extent that we do (…
The donations we got were usually either past their best or unpopular or both. When food expires, there's a period when it's still fine to eat, but it's best not to leave it too long.
So if you're a single parent working two jobs, and you get home at 7:30 to make dinner and you have a turnip you need to use tonight before it goes bad, what do you do?
Wouldn't it be great if someone with great logistics skill and insight into the stocks of all the area food banks could scrape allrecipes, find the most efficient use of the stock as ingredients, and maybe move some things around so that the people waiting for the trucks could get meal kits with online instructions, rather than just bags of turnips?
Just a thought.
Edit: The cool part of this might end up being the supplier side. I imagine that a supermarket has to work much harder to donate to a food pantry than to just throw out stuff. How could you make it easier for them to donate what was really needed? Could you have finders who go around to stores, enter the stuff to be thrown out into your system, decide what it would be worth it to take, take it, and keep track of yearly donations for the retailer for tax purposes? Could you cut their waste disposal costs and save them taxes and build goodwill?
The bigger idea here is that just because the consumers of your service aren't very focused on new technology doesn't mean that technology can't drive and enable your business model. There are probably many kinds of businesses that provide services to the underprivileged that would benefit from technology in the back office even if technology isn't their product.
I've constantly racked my brain on the Underserved Communities and Social Services: my dad is a Vietnam vet and my mom (while we were growing up) fit that single mother middle-class type...how does technology help them? Part of the problem is they aren't tech savvy the way the HN community is - so what works for our community doesn't exactly work for theirs, or that they even use technology to the extent that we do (…