Unintended consequences
Unintended consequences
Posted May 28, 2025 9:26 UTC (Wed) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644)In reply to: Unintended consequences by Cyberax
Parent article: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet
Posted May 28, 2025 17:07 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (14 responses)
I think this speaks to the high quality of LWN.
If we had to pay for content, 99.9% of sites would go bankrupt.
I don't think that's a bad thing. There's no law that says "Thou shalt be able to make money on the Internet" and I'd be happy if those few really good sites like LWN survived, and passion or hobby sites survived, and all the other slop disappeared off the Internet.
Posted May 28, 2025 18:19 UTC (Wed)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (13 responses)
Heck, I even miss the good old "20 facts about <something>, number 14 will shock you!" sites. They were a fun way to relax and waste 5-10 minutes.
It's so bad, that now "content creator" almost automatically means "YouTuber". Because YouTube videos are still reasonably profitable.
Posted May 28, 2025 19:00 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (12 responses)
Content creators need to eat, have families, etc. A good blog article can easily take days to write, and when you have a full-time job and family, they just tend to stop.
Yes? That's fine. I'd rather many fewer people be able to make a living at content creation than have the crappy Internet we do now.
I did standup comedy for about 8.5 years. I'd say 99.9% of comedians either have day jobs, are extremely poor, or both. C'est la vie. You're either in the 0.1% who are good enough and lucky enough to make a decent living at it, or you do it out of passion.
Posted May 29, 2025 3:12 UTC (Thu)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link]
Woah, that's cool, tough business I bet.
> I'd rather many fewer people be able to make a living at content creation than have the crappy Internet we do now.
I think that some of the problems are from trying to build monopolies, from trying to make a 10x rate of return on investment which leads to enshitification. There is plenty of room for a bunch of small journalistic sites, like LWN or 404media that have their niche and make a living selling their reporting and analysis, retail. Industry trade rags, local news from someone who goes to _all_ the local city council meetings, etc. can be sustainable, but not if bought up by VC or equity trying to make a fast buck. It's big sites which have trouble, with advertising, they want to be "free" to drive viewers, but they want to get paid so enshitification. I think there is room too for people to share their own thoughts who don't need to get paid, on others sites and by creating their own sites, what I miss is stuff like to Cobalt Qube, although Nextcloud is pretty close where people could host low-volume services like personal email/web from their own hardware in their own home, with minimal ongoing cost and minimal surveillance, just the occasional search crawler to make the content discoverable.
A bunch of this kind of stuff is still out there, like Nebula as an alternate distribution platform for professional documentaries than YouTube, but it's not as discoverable as the all-signing-all-dancing *large* services, and I don't think there is a way to have small-scale search to make things discoverable, any search service is by definition highly capitalized.
Posted May 29, 2025 3:56 UTC (Thu)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (10 responses)
This has happened with radio (Sinclair), video (Fox/CNN), and it will happen with the Internet.
Posted May 29, 2025 9:30 UTC (Thu)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (8 responses)
The difference is that the up-front cost of providing radio and video is relatively high - just the application fees for an FCC licence to run a station are going to run to $4,000 or so, and that's ignoring the cost of equipment to get going, and your annual fee (at $500 or so per year for a service area of under 10,000 people, going up to $20,000 for large areas). Including a transmitter, a tower, an antenna etc (and assuming someone donates the land for the tower for free), you're looking at at least $10,000 to set up a radio or TV station, and that only serves a small area.
For niche books and magazines, in contrast, I can do a print run of 1,000 copies of a 32 page magazine for under $500 (50 copies would be about $100), or spend the same to get 100 copies of a 300 page book (from a commercial print shop). It's then about $5 per copy to mail it out via USPS or similar.
That's a huge difference in both scale and costs; as an enthusiast about a niche, you can spend $500 to have your book or magazine printed and ready for you to post out, assuming that you can put the time in to produce the content yourself. While that's not cheap, it's within the reach of an enthusiast, and can be supported by other enthusiasts nationwide (if you can get 1,000 people in the entire US willing to pay $20/month for a magazine, you can pay your costs of production in full). In contrast, radio, or TV has start-up costs (assuming you're putting the time in to make the content for free) in the tens of thousands of dollars range for a small area, and you've got to hope that there are enough enthusiasts locally to make it worthwhile.
I suspect that the Internet is much more like the books + magazines situation; $50/month gets you quite a lot of hosting, nowadays (for video as well as for text), and that's the sort of cost that's low enough for an enthusiast to pay to get their content out there - and if there's enough similar enthusiasts around the world, pooling their funds to pay $50/month in total isn't implausible.
Posted May 29, 2025 16:50 UTC (Thu)
by excors (subscriber, #95769)
[Link] (1 responses)
Discoverability is poor because the social platforms are designed to promote popular content, and strongly incentivise producing popular content (because popularity is on an exponential curve, and one provocative clickbaity viral video with 10M views will pay way more than 100 decent videos with 10K views each), so that's most of what you see there. But the niche content still exists, if you can find it somehow amongst the garbage.
Posted May 29, 2025 17:23 UTC (Thu)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
The difference I'm calling out is that with radio and TV, the degree of investment needed to do it yourself, bypassing corporate gatekeepers, was huge, and thus when the corporate gatekeepers took control of local stations, you were pushed out, because you couldn't afford to keep your quirky niche going as a sideline.
In contrast, with print media, it's been possible for an enthusiast to bankroll a "fanzine" or similar since at least the 1960s, spending the sort of money that a hobbyist can afford to spend from disposable income (and that another person would spend on wrenching on cars, following their favourite team, or other hobbies).
I expect that, even if there was no advertising money at all (for artists or platforms) that Internet video, podcasts, blogs etc are closer to print media than to broadcast radio stations; yes, the big names have huge advantages over you (just as the official Star Trek magazine had huge advantages over fanzines in the 1960s), but $50/month gets you a lot of video, podcast, or blog hosting platform for your hobby content, and $50/month feels like it's in the "disposable income" category, not the "unaffordable for a hobby" category.
Posted Jun 1, 2025 21:08 UTC (Sun)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (5 responses)
It has happened in games. The websites and forums are mostly dead, and even professional review magazines are more dead than alive. Most of the new independent content is on Youtube. It's pure natural selection: authors who publish on Youtube can actually get some income stream going. And so they produce more content, as a result. Some of them even become professional Youtube content creators.
And it's terrible. Youtube has content guidelines and will gladly fuck up your channel for any reason (or no reason whatsoever). To give an example, there was a channel RZXArchive that contained playthroughs of ZX-Spectrum games. Its author passed away, and a couple of years later the channel got nuked by Youtube, presumably as a result of a copyright strike.
So yeah, I think that the way forward is to make it possible for websites to accept micropayments. Ads had served as a way to do that for a while, but they are now completely useless.
Posted Jun 2, 2025 16:34 UTC (Mon)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (4 responses)
And yes, the content put out by enthusiasts currently goes to YouTube, because it's the cheap way to do it - you can even get paid. But when that goes away, enthusiasts can, and will, go elsewhere - even if they have to pay to get their message out. They did in the 1960s, they did in the 1990s, and they will in future, as long as the cost of doing so isn't prohibitive ($100/month is doable, $1,000/month is not).
Posted Jun 2, 2025 17:14 UTC (Mon)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (3 responses)
> They did in the 1960s, they did in the 1990s, and they will in future, as long as the cost of doing so isn't prohibitive ($100/month is doable, $1,000/month is not).
I don't think so. Younger people will just not be interested in it. In 1960-s there was no other alternative, now there is.
Posted Jun 2, 2025 17:20 UTC (Mon)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (2 responses)
If Steam, YouTube, TikTok et al go away, or start charging insane amounts to host with them, or put in restrictions that are too painful to comply with, people will move.
After all, in the 1960s, there absolutely were corporate-controlled alternatives on offer; there was even an official Star Trek magazine. It's just that the enthusiasts wanted to get their stuff out, didn't want to comply with the corporate restrictions, and could afford to find an alternative. And that last bit is crucial to what enthusiasts will do when the corporate platforms lock down - they will find alternatives, and as long as affordable (hobby price grade) alternatives exist, they'll move.
Posted Jun 2, 2025 18:57 UTC (Mon)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (1 responses)
The sites still exist, but they have only a small percentage of the overall gaming population and are clearly in decline. While YouTube channels are flourishing (e.g. "Linus Tech Tips").
Posted Jun 3, 2025 9:24 UTC (Tue)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
I don't however, see that this means that the content will remain on YouTube forever; for now, YouTube offers a great deal for hosting content (it pays you a considerable amount), so that's where the creators of interesting content are congregating, but as YouTube puts limits on creators, they'll sort out things like Nebula, or even just paying for private video hosting from platforms like Vimeo. Thus, I'm not concerned about the risk of everything congregating on YouTube; people can, and do, move away from platforms where the alternative is better value to them.
Posted May 29, 2025 14:33 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
On the contrary, the earlier Internet was relatively much richer in quirky, niche content that today's internet full of vacuous influencers and AI-generated slop.
People who make quirky, niche content are not typically in it for the money, and if they are, they'll soon learn something called "reality". If there were fewer slop sites drowning them out, they might be able to attract a bit more financial support.
Posted May 28, 2025 17:42 UTC (Wed)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
But I won't subscribe to a random website's Patreon if I just want a couple of articles from there. On the other hand, I would be delighted to allow my web browser to pay a couple of cents to view an article.
Posted Jun 1, 2025 16:06 UTC (Sun)
by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
[Link]
If anything, that tells us how hard it is to create a subscription content business on the web.
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It hasn't, however, happened in models and games, magazine or book publishing; the quirky, niche cultural activities have continued to happen.
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For the same reason that Sinclair Broadcast Group used to put out quirky, niche radio shows, and for the same reason that you used to get quirky local TV - the Internet didn't exist back then.
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You say it's happened in games - but you then tell me about magazines and forums, and not games. As far as I can tell, looking at my shelf of board games, while Hasbro does indeed dominate, there's plenty of smaller publishers still out there, from people like Asmodee and their various brands, down to small companies that still keep putting out games (some of which have only put out a single game so far).
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Even computer games seem fairly healthy to me; yes, Sony, EA, Microsoft and Valve (Steam) control a lot of the market, but I'm seeing plenty of indie devs putting stuff out on itch.io, on their own websites (with their own payment mechanisms) etc. It's not gone away - it's just that (for now) Valve is being a good corporate citizen, so everybody's using them.
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From my perspective, that's just the normal shifts in the marketplace, and if YouTube becomes unviable as a place for content creators to put up content (e.g. demands $1,000/month just to keep your content available, plus subscriptions from viewers, too), the content will move elsewhere. It happens to be focusing in on YouTube right now because that's a platform that will pay you to provide content, whereas you'd have to pay to host it ad-free on Vimeo or similar.
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The exception that proves the rule