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What I want from the internet

chrbutler.com

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Re: What I want from the internet

#91

Post by DoreenMichele »

giantrobot wrote: post #90
DoreenMichele wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be assuming some things different from my reality. I make very little money from blogging. I took ads off years ago. It's not some kind of paid gig shilling for some product or whatever. I have a Patreon that makes too little and I take tips. I try to write what I think is meaningful. My writing has repeatedly made the front page of HN, often without making a dime. I've stopped posting it here. I'm tired…

> And yet people just expect high traffic to pay the bills, which it can if your monetization strategy is ads, but the HN crowd is fond of ad blockers and vocally critical of ads. For me the problem is not ads but the inevitable AdTech pushed under the guise of "ads". Too many sites want me to enable what they call ads but are really incredibly invasive spying systems. Many are compromised and actually deliver malwar…

I took ads off my websites years ago. I have no problem with the HN crowd being anti ad.

I'm just saying we have the means to pay content creators right now and the reality is people mostly expect free content and implicitly assume that if you have sufficient traffic, you are making money and the reality is that assumption de facto has baked in an ad-based monetization strategy.

Micropayments as people would like to imagine them don't yet exist.

Good writing takes time.

You want more of it, you should find a way to make it pay and, no, implicitly assuming an ad-based revenue model where you don't have to take a crowbar to your wallet and put it open and explicitly blocking ads and wanting nothing to do with them adds up to "Hello? Exactly how do you expect creative to make rent?"

Re: What I want from the internet

#92

Post by lelandbatey »

pixl97 wrote: post #61
JohnFen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You just gotta get out of the browser. I agree with this. The internet is a great tool. The web is extremely problematic and growing less useful over time. Too many people think that the internet and the web are the same thing.

Firewalls pretty much have made the internet and web the same thing, as discussed on HN in many threads. About the only services on the internet that are not wholesale blocked are DNS and HTTPS. The internet's usefulness as a tool has been greatly compromised because of this.

Is that true for personal internet connections, or just corporate ones? I've never felt any kind of big restrictions on what kind of traffic I send from my home connection.

Re: What I want from the internet

#93

Post by Karrot_Kream »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #68
qup wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you keep using the term "whining" to reference the article?

I've been on HN a lot of years. Lots of people here have money and as a group most of them consistently object to essentially any means to monetize content, pay content creators, etc while denying that this amounts to expecting slave labor from writers and also decrying the tragic lack of good quality writing. I used to try to consistently point out such patterns while being personally attacked, told to stop whining,…

Hey :wave:, I've been on HN for ages too and have seen you here forever. You're not the only one that's observed this behavior. A lot of us know it. The HN crowd thinks monetization is this gross, evil thing but also thinks the quality of content is in decline and only caters to the lowbrow. As you say, good writing from good writers (really good content from good creators) needs time, stability, and the safety to explore ideas. All of this requires money.

This crowd likes to point out that the early web had this kind of content, but they forget that the early web was composed mostly of perspectives from folks who had those luxuries and honestly had been only writing for a few years on the web. I remember trying in vain to find anything about the rap scene which was huge in my low-income area and in a lot of low-income America at the time but the truth was, none of the rappers who ended up making it in the mid-90s ever were situated in a way that would make it easy for them to use the Web to put their content out there. That's why everyone on the Web at the time was into heavy metal even though rap was flourishing in the US. The demographic that used the Web wore khakis at work and listened to metal at home.

I've (and my friends) just learned to ignore this content. It's a yearning for a more country club like internet. The neighborhood was a lot quainter when only the golfers with their luxury cars lived here. Now the riff raff wants to bike or drive their Mustangs and it's all lowest common denominator drivel.

Re: What I want from the internet

#94

Post by nobody9999 »

pixl97 wrote: post #57
reaperducer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I describe it as, the internet of books and text became the internet of videos and music. Except that the internet never was books, and was only text due to technological limitations. When we started networking all the computers together, we (myself included) had this vision of an information utopia where everyone would be able to access all of the information previously locked up in books, magazines, and newspapers.…

> had this vision of an information utopia where everyone When it comes to new technology and the impact it will have people are almost always wrong. The printing press not only made better books, it created oceans of shitty ones. We didn't have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law at the time to warn us.

>We didn't have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law at the time to warn us.

But we've had Sturgeon's Revelation[0] since 1957, and the idea has existed much longer. Why would one expect anything different just because it's "on the internet?"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Re: What I want from the internet

#95

Post by carlosjobim »

bombcar wrote: post #54
gonzo41 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I describe it as, the internet of books and text became the internet of videos and music. Not better or worse just different.

It went from an Internet of amateurs (those with an actual love for what they are talking about) to professionals (which are very slick, but the money is always there). You can still find great content in videos and music from amateurs, but the professionals "outshout" most of them; and the best amateurs end up getting sucked into being professionals. Once your livelihood is on the line, things change.

What exactly do you mean with "outshout"? Where are the professionals taking away the amateurs' space exactly?

Re: What I want from the internet

#96

Post by carlosjobim »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #7

I'm pretty darn sure I'm not the only independent content creator being largely ignored, attacked for "self promotion" if they post their own work while no one else ever posts it etc and then listening to people whine about the internet and how they wish this, that or the other while you roll your eyes and think to yourself again "This is the internet you helped create. If you don't like it, make other choices."

And if the independent content creator starts charging for his or her work, even their most dedicated fans will abandon and people will see it as a great offense.

Re: What I want from the internet

#97

Post by carlosjobim »

qup wrote: post #70
DoreenMichele wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on HN a lot of years. Lots of people here have money and as a group most of them consistently object to essentially any means to monetize content, pay content creators, etc while denying that this amounts to expecting slave labor from writers and also decrying the tragic lack of good quality writing. I used to try to consistently point out such patterns while being personally attacked, told to stop whining,…

Well let me respond, since maybe I'm one of those guys. You've fundamentally misunderstood what I want. If a "writer" wrote it as part of their job, I don't want to read it. I mean, I might, but that's not what I would be "whining" about here. I've kept blogs most of my life. I'm after similar content to what I would post. I don't care to read whatever you want to get paid to write. No offense, I'm sure it's great an…

> I don't care to read whatever you want to get paid to write.

Writers don't write to get paid, but they need to get paid to be able to continue to write. When writing seriously for high quality content, you need to treat it like a full time job, with massive focus. So if they can't get paid, then the only people with a voice are those with a comfortable income from somewhere else and a lot of time on their hands. And that's a very small subset of the population.

It's like enjoying food you get for free at a friend's house and returning the favor, but being insulted at the idea of paying in a restaurant.

Re: What I want from the internet

#98

Post by inconceivable »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #91
giantrobot wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yet people just expect high traffic to pay the bills, which it can if your monetization strategy is ads, but the HN crowd is fond of ad blockers and vocally critical of ads. For me the problem is not ads but the inevitable AdTech pushed under the guise of "ads". Too many sites want me to enable what they call ads but are really incredibly invasive spying systems. Many are compromised and actually deliver malwar…

I took ads off my websites years ago. I have no problem with the HN crowd being anti ad. I'm just saying we have the means to pay content creators right now and the reality is people mostly expect free content and implicitly assume that if you have sufficient traffic, you are making money and the reality is that assumption de facto has baked in an ad-based monetization strategy. Micropayments as people would like to…

people are making tons of money on substack. so why not you?

Re: What I want from the internet

#99

Post by DoreenMichele »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #93
DoreenMichele wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on HN a lot of years. Lots of people here have money and as a group most of them consistently object to essentially any means to monetize content, pay content creators, etc while denying that this amounts to expecting slave labor from writers and also decrying the tragic lack of good quality writing. I used to try to consistently point out such patterns while being personally attacked, told to stop whining,…

Hey :wave:, I've been on HN for ages too and have seen you here forever. You're not the only one that's observed this behavior. A lot of us know it. The HN crowd thinks monetization is this gross, evil thing but also thinks the quality of content is in decline and only caters to the lowbrow. As you say, good writing from good writers (really good content from good creators) needs time, stability, and the safety to ex…

I was homeschooling at a time when there were some really wonderful free resources on the internet to support that. One woman did handwriting consulting and eventually took the free resources off her website because it conflicted with her efforts to support herself as a consultant and at that time there was nothing like Patreon.

"Freedom isn't free." Neither is a free internet. Someone has to somehow put in the time and effort, etc.

You need to either find a way to pay some of these people or accept that what's here will mostly be the hobbies of the comfortably well off and can disappear at a moment's notice on a whim.

Re: What I want from the internet

#100

Post by visarga »

bsder wrote: post #69
visarga wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would keep Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Stack Overflow. I'd be very sad to lose YouTube. It's the jewel of the internet.

Except that it's not. YouTube is a giant hole of suck that brings everybody else down to their level. YouTube being subsidized has driven any competitor out of the space. Since YouTube has a monopoly, your content will get copied and posted over there even if you don't give permission . Since YouTube is backed by Google, they are larger than lawsuits which could bring them to heel. If you wanted YouTube to improve, s…

Maybe splitting YT is a good idea, but even with all the junk YT still is a jewel. There are incredible things in there - art, lectures, philosophy, so much value packed inside.
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