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The web's original sin

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Re: The web's original sin

#41

Post by mwcampbell »

Diamons wrote: post #24

I don't understand. This article claims users feel entitled to free content on the internet and then goes into a rant about pricing and ad blockers while doing nothing to address the glaring fact that he himself thinks he's entitled to make money off of content. The internet is for the people. It is a free and open service for anyone to use. The only one entitled is the content creator who feels that they have a righ…

> The internet is for people, not for businesses.

Businesses are just people trying to make a living, which just about everyone has to do.

Re: The web's original sin

#42

Post by pc86 »

cousin_it wrote: post #30

Without ads, people would still put up tons of free content. Not just for the love of humanity, but also because receiving attention is a kind of power. People crave to influence what others think. As long as you have that, you can always rationalize away the lack of money.

And this is certainly a generalization/assumption, but all else being equal it will probably be easier for the person with a tech blog getting 150K uniques in a month to get a job than the person without it.

So even having this large block of free content can have a direct financial impact on the creator without syndication/ads/sponsors etc.

Re: The web's original sin

#43

Post by dangoor »

There are cases of individuals who make money charging for content (Ben Thompson comes to mind: https://stratechery.com/) and others who give away their content but have managed to put together revenue streams that don't annoy their users (http://daringfireball.net/).

If someone has unique content that other people want, especially as an individual rather than a multi-person business, there are ways to make money. It's not "baked into the web", so it may require being creative about how the offering is put together... but, it's still doable.

What makes Ben Thompson an interesting example is that there is no shortage of people writing about trends in tech. But he has a focus and style that are unique enough that people pay to subscribe to his updates.

Re: The web's original sin

#44

Post by SimonPStevens »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #8

I would love to have a thoughtful, Civ-like game on my phone. Its a Samsung Galaxy 5 with a 128gig micro-sd card. I know its powerful enough, but if its out there, I haven't found it. I, and many others, happily pay for such games on PC and gaming platforms, but on phones and Web, it seems oddly taboo. P.S. I'm not goving up my blockers on my computer browser. They aren't "ad" blockers; they're malware protection. To…

There are some. Civilization Revolution is available for iOS and Windows Phone. I'm not sure why they never did an Android version.

I played the Windows Phone version back when it was released. It was fairly decent. I'm not a civ aficionado though, so I don't know how well it stands up when compared to other editions.

The thing is though, if I'm going to play a decent game that takes time and thought, I sit down at my laptop or console. It's not really what I want from a phone. I want a game that I can play for 2 minutes while I wait for something else. It's not that I'm not prepared to spend £+ for a decent mobile game, it's that when I want to buy a decent complex game, I tend to choose a different platform to buy the game on.

Re: The web's original sin

#45

Post by swiley »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #20
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #8

I would love to have a thoughtful, Civ-like game on my phone. Its a Samsung Galaxy 5 with a 128gig micro-sd card. I know its powerful enough, but if its out there, I haven't found it. I, and many others, happily pay for such games on PC and gaming platforms, but on phones and Web, it seems oddly taboo. P.S. I'm not goving up my blockers on my computer browser. They aren't "ad" blockers; they're malware protection. To…

You can do this now by running dosbox on your phone. A cursory search shows that somebody's selling "dosbox turbo" on google play for $2.50. I tend to think the impoverished nature of phone games is related to the available controls. You see a lot of phone/tablet games that amount to "wait for something to become clickable, and then click on it". Maybe we need to provide an input method beyond "fat-finger your screen…

Once upon a time handhelds had hardware buttons (some even had qwerty keyboards in addition to larger hardware buttons) but these have unfortunately been replaced with inaccurate touch screens.

Re: The web's original sin

#46

Post by yorik »

One nice thing of the internet is that it forces openness and rewards it.

If some site goes behind a paywall, what it really does is to remove itself from the internet, giving more visibility opportunities to people who want primarily to communicate and share ideas, instead of strategically monetizing content (or whatever it is called today).

Also, the author is doing some confusion on who feels entitled =)

Re: The web's original sin

#47

Post by kps »

liotier wrote: post #12

When I open my mouth to talk to my neighbor, I am not producing "content" - I am communicating. The Web is a communication medium. The lack of commercial functionality baked in the communication medium is a feature not a bug. Whoever uses the word "content" betray his bias as a commercial publisher.

Yes; WorldWideWeb was written in 1989, when commercial ‘content’ on the Internet was approximately zero.

Re: The web's original sin

#48

Post by egypturnash »

> I suppose a Kickstarter campaign could work, but this would again cost me a lot of time working on something I’m not familiar with, and even if it succeeds I’d have to start thinking about next year’s Kickstarter campaign pretty quickly. Still, this might be a solution.

> I added a donation link to my site-wide footer. So far the response has been minimal, though two or three people did send me small amounts. (Thanks!) But a donation drive needs a lot of attention as well — it won’t run itself.

Patreon. He wants Patreon. It combines the good parts of KS and a donation link, it runs itself a lot better than a PayPal donation widget or whatever.

Re: The web's original sin

#49

Post by louisphilippe »

Virtually all high quality content on the web is written by either a full-time practitioner who is trying to build a reputation or gain some amount of recognition.

For example:

Entrepreneur and investor bloggers such as Paul Graham, Marc Andreessen, Brad Feld, Sam Altman, plus the dozens of founders who post their articles to Hacker News produce the best writing available on founding a business. They do this because if they provide good information, they build their own brand.*

The best posts on software engineering come from bloggers and Hacker News commenters who again, are trying to build their own brand.

The best posts economics or finance come from those actually working in the field, or from obsessed amateurs who spend hours each week studying the issues on their own.

The best posts on criminal justice issues comes from Peter Moskos, who was an actual Baltimore Cop, and is now a professor of criminal justice ( http://www.copinthehood.com/ ). Even if he charged micropayments for his posts, there is no way he is going to make money off of his site. Yet the information he provides is order of magnitude better than any journalist who has no domain knowledge of the subject matter.

Most beat reporters producing run-of-the-mill news are entirely dependent on their sources for information. If these beat reporters were simply paid by the sports team or institutions that they covered, and essentially worked as their communications office, it would be a more honest relationship and the quality of coverage would be no worse.

Basically, I don't see what the role in the world is for the professional, full-time "content" provider. There is simply no need for anyone to be an intermediary between the practitioner and the audience. If you are a professional practitioner, then the financial benefits in terms of building a brand dwarf any benefits from earning micropayments. Thus I don't think the existence of micropayments would result in any greater amount of high quality content.

* Note for the pedantic, this is not to imply that all content produced by people trying to improve their own reputation is good content. 98% of everything is crap.

Re: The web's original sin

#50

Post by thebaer »

mikeash wrote: post #28
liotier wrote: post #12

When I open my mouth to talk to my neighbor, I am not producing "content" - I am communicating. The Web is a communication medium. The lack of commercial functionality baked in the communication medium is a feature not a bug. Whoever uses the word "content" betray his bias as a commercial publisher.

That seems like a bad analogy. The web wasn't built as a real-time one-to-one communications medium, it was built as a way to publish documents. Later on, enough stuff got added to the system to enable comment forms and chat boxes and whatnot, but the basis of the thing was always document publishing. Take a look at the original web site: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html That's clearly a non-interact…

I think the analogy is apt. The medium, unlike a printed newspaper for example, enables communication as much as it enables one-way publishing. And isn't the latter a subset of communication?

Think of a personal site. What is that, if not communication about oneself? And once you blog on that site or publish essays [1], the line between a publishing / communication medium heavily blurs. There's nothing inherent about the web that says it must be one thing or the other — it's how people have and continue to use it.

There's also a lot to be said about the "fun" of creating things on a global communication platform. Many free tools like YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter are popular because they let the average person utilize the same power of the web we've always had. Some people monetize what they create on those platforms; others use it to communicate; commercial entities create "content" on it; and yet more people use it just for fun. It's all about how you use the medium.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

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