We Finally Have Proof That the Internet Is Worse::High-profile lawsuits against Google and Amazon have revealed Silicon Valley’s vise grip on our lives.
Getting hit by a paywall to read this article, maybe made the point better than the article!
Do you usually complain when anything else in life is not completely free?
Either it’s paywalls or horrible ads+tracking. I don’t know why people expect to get everything for free, just because it’s on the internet. Especially something that takes time and effort to make.
PSA: you don’t get to complain about “the media” if you’re not even willing to pay for quality outlets
The biggest problem with paying for journalism is that nobody wants to be subscribing to 50 different websites.
If it were easier to pay for multiple news sites at once, I’m sure more people would do it.
Or just microcharge articles. I’m willing to pay 50cts for an article. But I dont want to signup for a subscription only to forget about it and pay 30 bucks afterwards.
That’s what I’ve been thinking would be the best way to do that.
Some sort of API that each news outlet implements into their website that bills your account on a per-article basis when you read through it (once you’ve scrolled like 10% of the way down).
As a layman, I would expect the main difficulty would be getting news outlets to be part of it rather than pushing their own subscriptions.
Yeah. Could you do it?
Normally I’m all about “yes they should be paid” but in this case it’s particularly ironic - modest ads used to be able to support newspapers. Now they need paywalls.
Title of article: internet is worse
QED.
Oh wow, you thought that you counter 1 and 1 together while completely missing that this is a complex equation.
Ads and ad revenue are not the same as they used to be, and the economics of the world and technology have changed. So until you understand the complexities of the world, please stop talking out of your ass and using shit like “QED” to sound smarter than you are.
I think you missed their point. They pointed out the irony. Which is valid. They didn’t explore viability of monetization.
And then you fall into that kind of toxic tone…
The internet isn’t worse, it’s just the web. The Internet is much better actually:
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There are more subsea cables with more capacity, the Internet is meshed better these days. Losing any single subsea cable doesn’t have as much of an impact as it used to.
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Additionally you don’t need to cache stuff with reverse proxies in each AS anymore because long distance transmission has gotten way cheaper, and more available.
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The last mile issues are also solved, though for now only in densly populated areas in advanced economies. With fiber connections to individual dwellings you get scaling that’s infinite for practical purposes. This also means you can have a gigabit connection end to end without bloating buffers on DSL or DOCSIS modems.
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In recent years, it’s been harder to love the internet, a miracle of connectivity that feels ever more bloated, stagnant, commercialized, and junkified. We are just now starting to understand the specifics of this transformation—the true influence of Silicon Valley’s vise grip on our lives. It turns out that the slow rot we might feel isn’t just in our heads, after all.
☹️
The Internet is getting more decentralized, with better alternatives for big corporate services
it’s it though?
in our Fediverse bubble yes.
but so many average people just don’t care.
