I am sick and tired of posts that are just Twitter links.

[usonian]

44. Paywalls

When facts are all paywalled, only hate and lies will be free


Now, there is an exception.
Some sources of information are truly free, such as Wikipedia and other publicly-funded outlets.

What's wrong here?
Well, our culture's worship of capitalism and the campaign against "gubmint", plus extreme partisanship, means that public sources as in taxpayer funding of objective sources of timely information, are about nil. Pretty vicious attacks on public radio, tv and so forth. I recall, part of culture wars.

Under capitalism, particularly "surveillance capitalism", when the product is free, you are the product --- being sold to advertisers.
I have so many articles on this that it's hard to search, but I came up with informative links. The Kagi one is good even if it's an ad for their services. If NYT is paywalled, plug the URL into archive.ph


The Age of PageRank is Over. (search, not news, but companies pivoted into news feeds to keep you locked in to their platforms (FB))
https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over

Trump, Musk and Kanye Are Twitter Poisoned
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-twitter.html

And the granddaddy of all rants against advertising, over 11 years old and still relevant:
Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advertising-poison-hooked

Alas, public projects are subject to trolls and creeps. Wikipedia has many battleground pages which have to be monitored by real people. At least, their goal is some kind of objectivity. With advertising-driven sites, the more clicks the better, so they are "often" lax in moderating content. In Elon's case, it seems deliberately lax, letting Kanye spew antisemitism.

i have bitched a lot about supposedly smart people not being able to come up with a business model (right back to Page and Brin at Google) so they resort to advertising. The alternative is NOT paywalling everything, not even "soft paywalls" (as in "You have exceeded your free page limit)". Yes, people have to be paid, but the distinction between commodity information that "everyone" needs to know, and in-depth content as in "I wrote a book on this subject" still is a subject of experimentation ON YOU AND ME.