this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
1293 points (97.6% liked)
Mildly Infuriating
35433 readers
577 users here now
Home to all things "Mildly Infuriating" Not infuriating, not enraging. Mildly Infuriating. All posts should reflect that.
I want my day mildly ruined, not completely ruined. Please remember to refrain from reposting old content. If you post a post from reddit it is good practice to include a link and credit the OP. I'm not about stealing content!
It's just good to get something in this website for casual viewing whilst refreshing original content is added overtime.
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means: -No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
7. Content should match the theme of this community.
-Content should be Mildly infuriating.
-At this time we permit content that is infuriating until an infuriating community is made available.
...
8. Reposting of Reddit content is permitted, try to credit the OC.
-Please consider crediting the OC when reposting content. A name of the user or a link to the original post is sufficient.
...
...
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
Reach out to LillianVS for inclusion on the sidebar.
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Worse than what? Paying Atlantic for a subscription?
Whether we like the Atlantic or not, I feel like at some point if we want quality journalism we need to fund it.
You miss the bigger picture. The shit journalism and propaganda are still free - funded by … other means . That is why magazine have tried to be free in the internet.
You’re also operating with the wisdom of hindsight. No one knew how to handle internet publishing. We all learned together.
I pretty much agree, but I really wish we could move away from ads being literally everywhere in our lives. I'd rather them just charge a little bit more and have a better experience. It's probably falling on deaf ears, though, because nobody ever wants to pay for anything on the internet.
To your point, maybe if what we got in return were worth a shit, people would be more willing to pay. But it gets shittier and shittier, more and more inundated with ads, worse journalism with more clickbait and AI, all for prices that go up every year to multiple times per year.
It was more reasonable when you could go to the store and pay for one newspaper or one issue of a magazine. Then if you really liked it you could subscribe. Now there's no other option but to subscribe. Not everyone wants to be paying a bunch of separate subscription fees per month just to get decent news, and not everyone wants one hundred percent of a news outlets content. But we're charged for it regardless. Fuck no, no one wants to pay for that.
Maybe if it were one of the only things that required a subscription. Like it used to be. But now, almost every single thing we use comes with a subscription charge and there's usually no other way to pay for it. It's all or nothing. And it gets totally exhausting, aggravating, and ridiculously expensive, especially when they force you to pay for a bunch of shit you don't need, or they charge you cancellation fees on top of an extra month, or raise the monthly price without telling you, or tack on extra charges for shit that should just come with it in the first place, etc etc.
My point is, no one should defend the subscription model. If an outlet does good journalism, they'll have donors. PBS Newshour, NPR, Democracy Now, they're some of the best souces and they're all nonprofit. And, what do you know, none of them have actual ads.
And shoutout to local libraries to loaning current magazine issues online. I get a Libby notification every time the New Yorker comes out. And I'm sure they're losing a ton of money because I don't personally pay for a subscription /s
You make good points. I do think maybe if we never went down this road of everything being ad supported, then it wouldn't be this bad. It is the world we live in now, though, and I doubt there is any going back to what could have been
I think the real problem is enshittification. Ads are gross and annoying, but ads are sold through ad networks. The networks started by enticing sites, who built their revenue model around it.
And with news in particular, guess which ad networks both sold ads and drove most of their traffic? Facebook and Google. And then they used this power to come up with the embedded standard that let's them show articles without using the site, and threatened them with cutting off the user stream entirely if they fought back...
Then toss in ISPs and later csps killing off local hosting, and hosting a website is no longer something you just do with your old computer in the basement...
I think it's time to make a more decentralized Internet not run for corporate profit. It's not going to save news sites, but the main Internet seems doomed from where we are...
I can't stand when companies double dip. I won't pay if I still get ads.
What if it comes with one of those cologne insert peel back samples?
Then I must've stolen the wrong magazine by mistake.
Doesn't matter how it happened, only that it is happening and everyone is disinterested in saving quality journalism.
The fact that yellow journalism is free and quality journalism is hidden behind a paywall, and the fact that many internet people are indignant about both journalism in general and paying for it while also guzzling down exclusively headlines and third hand information in comment sections through a firehose, are what will be studied in future decades about why there was suddenly a strange and convoluted anti-intellectual movement in this era.
But do paywalls actually encourage people to pay? I would point out that NPR/PBS and The Guardian are at least partially funded by the people but still offer news for free and it seems to work.
NPR is funded by underwriters, donors, government grants, and licensing their content to affiliate stations. It’s actually really interesting to see how they’ve cobbled it together. So yeah it’s free for you and me but a lot of money is actually flowing back and forth.
Point being there are a lot of ways to fund things!
My point is they don't have to rely on paywalls. And I don't know about The Guardian, but NPR isn't trying to make a profit, which is probably part of it. Anyway, I use it for a lot of my news. It's not wholly impartial, but it tries a lot harder than most American news outlets.
I’m just saying there are a lot of ways to make it work!
Regulation would be a better way to improve the quality of journalism, IMO.
I think that would be opening a pretty nasty can of worms. I don't trust any ruling power to decide what "quality" means for the press.
Not really opening up anything. For instance, BBC news is regulated and a lot more reliable and factual than anything in the US. And the US had minimal regulations which were removed in the late 80s and others removed in the 90s. That's why the quality of journalism in the corporate-controlled world has crumbled in my lifetime.
Or another way to put it: the ruling party DOES regulate the news in America, but the ruling party is the wealthy folks who own the news. There is almost no worse system than "funding" the news to get quality.
Fair point. I don't mean to suggest that authors don't deserve to be paid for their work. And while the article discusses Google and Amazon's attempts to manipulate online behavior to drive up their profits, I remember a time when paywalls were a rare exception rather than the rule while reading articles online.
That's because there was a time when everyone had print subscriptions that were healthy, and the internet just gave them extra money for ads. When you start losing subscribers because everyone is looking at your shit online for free, you learn you need to charge for it.
Is anyone actually paying for it though?
Don't get me wrong, actual journalists deserve a great wage. I just haven't seen much of it worth paying for in recent years. Real journalists get locked up and it looks like the rest took that threat very seriously. I'm not going to pay money to read corporate puff pieces and controlled opposition.
The Atlantic often does long, in-depth stories and has proven to be a very reliable source. Their journalists have proven themselves in getting some great sources. Just in the last couple of weeks admissions by John Kelley and Gen Milley have proven stories The Atlantic broke 2 years ago with anonymous sources were accurate and credible.
The Atlantic is a pretty reputable source. And I think there's a difference between subscribing to news for news reporting like the New York Times, The Guardian, etc, vs subscribing to magazine like the Atlantic, New Yorker, or New Republic that will give you more political commentary and analysis. Both have a role to play and both need subscribers. I subscribe to the Atlantic on and off (I've kind of rotated between the atlantic, new republic, and the nation over time). Primary subscriptions for my household are the New York Times and New Yorker. Then I have my annual membership/donations for NPR and PBS. Gotta support the news and good political commentary. It's holiday season soon. Subscriptions make good holiday gifts.
Yt is complaining about adblocker not being allowed. Waiting for disable unless you whitelist
Worse than it had been previously.
Oh the irony