Comment on Facebook ate and then ignored the news industry. It's hard, but we should leave it be
Zagorath@aussie.zone 8 months agoFacebook et al. established and grew their ad businesses by relaying journalists’ work
Omg I am getting sick of hearing this lie. No, Facebook does not use journalists’ work. The send the newspapers readers. They are adding value to the news orgs by giving them customers. It’s ridiculous to double dip by expecting Facebook to also pay for sending them traffic.
CaptObvious@literature.cafe 8 months ago
We both know that’s not how stereotypical FB users work. They read the news on the platform. Full stop. They didn’t pause doomscrolling to go read the same article on the producers’ websites.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 8 months ago
There is no news on Facebook. There are links to news articles.
CaptObvious@literature.cafe 8 months ago
Which people don’t follow. Hell, they don’t even stop scrolling on Lemmy to click the links.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 8 months ago
Lemmy is actually far worse than Facebook*. We often get AI to summarise the article, or even just post direct links to an archived version of the article that bypasses paywalls and/or stops them getting advertising revenue or viewership metrics.
As far as people not following, so? That’s not Facebook stealing value from them. It’s people deciding that there’s no value to them in clicking through. Probably in no small part due to a perceived decline in quality of reporting that means the headline is often all people feel the need to read.
The fact that people see the title and thumbnail and decide not to click through is still not a valid reason to expect Facebook to pay news organisations anything.
* to be more accurate, the culture that has evolved on Lemmy. The platform itself is no better or worse than Facebook.