Today's web is the opposite of what early Internet utopians had in mind. Now the situation is somewhat similar to climate change: even committed activists can no longer turn the tide for the better.
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I imagine you're probably talking more about content, but you've uncovered a pet peeve of mine having more to do with the structure of web pages.
The original vision of html was to have this beautiful format that flows text and graphics elegantly over whatever space you give it. I remember thinking this is great! One day we will have pocket-sized displays and the web is already future-proofed to work seamlessly in that world.
Then fast-forward to smart phones. By now, web pages were so rigidly formatted that they had to design special mobile versions of every site.
This one is actually good. The second one kinda sucks IMO.
For a laugh, view the page source and scroll down.
Marketing ruins everything.
I think that's too generalized. Marketing finances the Internet just as it has always financed print media (including the good, even inversitgative journalism).
I would definitely prefer a world in which sources of content are often paid-only instead of ad-supported, but the main thing needed for such a world is a higher minimum wage so more people have disposable income to distribute to authors they appreciate.
This would mean that if someone posts a rage-bait article like "Is Former President OBAMA Stealing Opium Money OUT OF YOUR POCKET?" then maybe people will click it, but the author won't gain anything out of it.
The only way this would work is if you paid for a subscription to many news sources a la Netflix. No one will buy subscriptions to each individual author or publication. But of course Netflix now has ads too, so greed really has no bounds, especially once they've got you roped in.
Patreon has pretty much already taken that spot.
A bigger concern with that model is that then Netflix of news or whatever gets to choose what you see. We'd have the Netflix of news with their own baked-in bullshit leading the charge regardless of how shit it was. Esoteric sources would die and popularity would rule that space.
Yeah how about no? Knowledge should be free, I'm not gonna pay 5c every time I want to open Youtube or some shit. In a utopia you'd pay some small government tax that'd go towards keeping the web ad and paywall free, so the people get happy and the greedy corporate rats get their dirty money.
That assumes either all sites on the web deserve equal compensation for their acts, or some body can decide what the relative value of each is and compensate each creator accordingly. You’d go back to having click farms, but they’d claim the government owes them a billion dollars for their high traffic.
Even the government would usually prefer that citizen money go directly to the systems that they prefer to support, rather than go through taxes to a government program that sponsors them (that’s why you get tax deduction for transit usage and charities). That second route is just needlessly complex.
There’s also better models for payment than microcharges. No one wants to consciously spend 5 cents in an online action. YouTube could require users to be subscribers to view or upload certain forms of content, or each individual creator would integrate some form of Patreon setup. A really simple solution would be to divide someone’s monthly subscription fee based on who they watched most that month.
I think that's too generalized. Print and written media existed for literally thousands of years before marketing finance.
Touch some grass.
Print and written media existed for literally thousands of years
Uh, no? If by media you mean anything that could remotely considered for the masses then absolutely not. The printing press was so revolutionary because it allowed making multiple copies of written documents without doing them each manually. Reading and writing was so expensive and rare a hobby because the written word was expensive; why would you need to read more than the basic signs if chalk boards were your limit of writing?
"News" before then was word of mouth. Town criers and the like.
My neato.
Guy replies with a hyperbolic shitpost about capitalism.
OP replies sincerely.
I reply hyperbolically in turn.
You assume I'm serious, then assume media can only mean "the mass news media" while ignoring any subtler parallels about access to information and adoption. (e.g. Does reading and writing being expensive relate to the early internet where access and hosting were expensive? Does the evolution of the written word have parallels with the evolution of the internet?)
If I'm responding semi-seriously, I do want to note that it's only in the American school system where there's no writing until the west gets paper. Armies of scribes carved into stone, impressed into clay, and wrote onto vellum to blanket empires in written news.
Armies of scribes carved into stone, impressed into clay, and wrote onto vellum to blanket empires in written news.
Yes. This semi-happened elsewhere. But this isn't for the "people". These were for the rich and powerful and the government.
And I'm sorry if your shitpost wasn't understood. As has always been the case, text is not a great medium for conveying sarcasm. We did invent /s for that reason.
I'm talking about modern print media of course, cmon. Also Printing does not date back thousands of years - it was invented (in the west) by gutenberg in the 15th century. What are you saying?
Printing existed a long time before the printing press. But woodblock printing lacked responsive design so we're definitely being too generalized.
I am aware of that. Either way, in this context, it is not useful to go over the long history of writing or print technology. I just wanted to say that even the now largely dysfunctional business models of the print media - I mean, of course, the opinion-forming press, such as newspapers or magazines - are historically linked to advertising sales. There were even advertisements in books. This is how journalism has always been financed (in fact, subscriptions still only account for a small proportion of revenues). And it's the same on the Internet: News sites are essentially funded by ads - the same way all major social media platforms and most of major websites work. In my opinion, it is unrealistic to claim that marketing revenues can be dispensed with, because creating content is very time-consuming and therefore costly.
I'm saying you're responding incoherently to people making fun of you because you can't tell they're giving you shit for your bad take.
I'm saying you're pick and choosing your battles so you can feel bad about the modern world while ignoring the fact that you're a part of the growing movement against the corporate web.
The corporate hatred you have isn't new. Infinite growth isn't sustainable and the awareness of that is growing.
Newspapers, books, music, TV, aren't dead, they've continuing to evolve and independent creators are producing more worthwhile works than I'll ever make it through. And all of those were "dead" before the internet. "Video killed the radio star" after all. But, we've seen several newsrooms destroyed as not-profitable enough, only to get restarted as employee owned newsrooms. There's never been a better time to be a patron of the arts or a music fan.
Even so, the world doesn't exist online. Talk to people in your community. You'll feel better and the work and art they're creating is more impactful than "content".
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I honestly didn't realize anyone was making fun of me (the joke is on me I guess, I just don't get it). I don't have a problem with the current times tho. But I know the content business. I don't call it that because I have no appreciation for art, writing or other creative arts, but because that's the term used in business. And from this environment I also know that profits are unfortunately placed above good content, which is why creative people, aka content creators, are not paid appropriately imo. I have also recognized this spirit, which I do not approve of at all, in many Lemmy posts. Only in disguise, so to speak: namely with people who think that intellectual property only helps large corporations like Disney. In my experience, that's not the case at all. People make a living from their creative work and patreon donations are simply not enough - at least not for a regular and secure income. What I was getting at with my comment is that it doesn't make sense imo to complain about a content creator signing marketing contracts - that has always been part of this business, even in the days of print media.
And I guess my main point is that focus on defeatism.
You also couldn't make money as an artist at basically any other point in history either. But now you have more opportunity to try and make a go of it either in the corporate space (although we'll see if AI kills those positions) or as an indie. If you care, don't give up and watch whatever the algorithm is feeding you. Consume indie art from the people who want to make a go at it. They exist in your local community and there are several coops have sprung up in the last couple years focused on music and handmade crafts with the enshittification of the existing platforms.
That is true. Artists today probably have more opportunities to sell their work. I hope it stays that way, or rather I hope that they can continue to earn at least decent wages. I try to support this with my limited means, even though I am not a creator myself.
What does touch some grass mean?
Also, what kind of print and media existed for thousands of years? I thought it was just religious scrolls and cave paintings
Just saying they're a bit terminally online.
The oldest consumer complaint is from approximately 3800 years ago and is a clay tablet complaining about the copper they received from Ea-Nasir. (A meme you might have seen around, even if you didn't know that context)
Ancient Egyptians were around long enough they were doing archeology on Ancient Egyptians. There's plenty of science and engineering in China and Africa that predates Pythagoras' weird cult. (Srsly, if you're not familiar with the cult of Pythagoras, highly recommend)
well, at its heart, the 'www' was supposed to be a bunch of documents linked to each other contextually... in a similar vein Wikipedia handles things
you ever try and use the web without images? genX remembers.
Yes, I'm mainly concerned with the content. HTML certainly gives you all the possibilities, but it has ultimately led to boring but easy-to-use and correspondingly restictive UIs. I think anyone who wants to reach a lot of people today will do so via social media (original Myspace unfortunately didn't work out, tho).
actually made my own site https://sandwich.sh/ you can do quite a lot with just html, I just don't know what. the archive section is html generated with a bash script. sending it here because I think it's cool