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.
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.
Caligvla@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Katana314@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
realitista@lemm.ee 8 months ago
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.
DandomRude@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Patreon has pretty much already taken that spot.
Neato@ttrpg.network 8 months ago
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.