> 1. Content creators have to be paid, or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist.
YMMV, I suppose we may be browsing different parts of the Internet, but I know content I love would mostly stay intact. From my personal and subjective experience, nearly everything that is actually worth anything on the Internet is made by unpaid volunteers for whom creating content is an end in itself, and not a way to earn money. Wikipedia? Check. HN discussions? Check. Topical subreddits? Check. Tutorials, videos, articles? Check, check, check. In fact, over time I've noticed a strong negative correlation between trustworthiness of content and amount of ads around it.
Heck, myself I created lots of such content and always felt it should be distributed for free.
Sure, videogames, music, movies, etc. are a different story. They are products that usually require full-time engagement of skilled professionals and you can't really get around paying for those. But your average web page? Rule of thumb: the more ads it projects, the more likely it is that it exists only to earn money off you (quality or dependability of content be damned).
TL;DR: I don't mind if upon removing ad support half of the Internet goes to shit. It was the bad part.
Oh, and since someone will surely bring up New York Times - I say, let it burn. Let's be honest with ourselves, we all know mainstream media are 1% content, 99% combination of bullshit and malicious lies. I'm willing to support that 1% with cash, but not the 99%. It is harmful to society and it should die.
I tend to agree with you. Of course I started using the internet in the late 80s. At that time, the absolute best things on the internet were Usenet FAQs. These days it is really hard to find things of that quality because you are overrun with people trying to make a buck.
I think a good example is recipes. At one point, I instructed google to ignore food.com, about.com, food-network.com and a few more. But now there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of sites that are simply indiscriminate collectors of (mostly) crap recipes. If I search for a recipe for ramen, I'm looking for the obsessed guy who eats ramen 3 meals a day, tweaks everything until it is just perfect, and knows all the differences between ramen in every area, and knows how to make his own noodles, etc, etc. I'm not looking for, "Buy some instant noodles and use canned consume instead of the crap soup in the package" (Review: "5 stars!!! My husband and I make this all the time." The rest of the page is full of ads.)
And these days you get kind of "boutique" websites where someone has decided to have a go and make it their livelihood. And as much as some of these are really good, the vast majority are just writing 2000 words of how they went to Japan and tried ramen and how they couldn't get a hotel room in Kyoto because it was golden week and they didn't know that it got so busy... followed by, "Recipe: Buy some instant noodles and use canned consume instead of the crap soup in the package" (Comments: "5 stars!!! My wife and I make this all the time." The right 30% of the page is filled with ads).
The thing is that in order to be really amazingly informed about something, you really need to obsess about it. So the really amazing websites seem to be run by people who are thinking "I need some place to put down my ideas", not "What can I write that will make me money". Sometimes the former also manage to make money on their writing, but by and large I think the best sites are the ones that are not motivated by profit.
I have thought for a long time that we need a different kind of search engine (which I will tentatively call "Otaku"). Instead of of ranking pages based on popularity, they would be ranked on how nerdy they were. I'd love to get my old internet back ;-)
Doesn't matter. They don't create the content, but merely facilitate creation by unpaid volunteers.
Yes, they use ads, and if they didn't, I probably would be happy to pay or donate (if only to keep all the topical forums in one place and not revert to dark ages of phpBB and linear discussion threads). But let's not cheat ourselves - the ads are not paying for the content, they are merely supporting an efficient platform.
I like reddit because they encourage people to visit the websites of the content creators by way of link aggregation. You go to /r/Worldnews or something, and it's a link to the BBC or Reuters. They don't host the articles themselves. This sends much needed traffic to the people who deserve it. Whether you're a big name like cnn.com or a small publisher like StevesBlog.com, you're on an equal playing field.
There are some issues which are really simple. Feeding people lies and bullshit to earn money is rather a clear-cut issue. So is encouraging dysrationalia. And yes, as a member of society it is my right to voice my opinion about whether something is endangering it.
It's not just about me not wanting to read the bad stuff. If I dislike a page, I just don't visit it, I usually don't complain. But when talking about mass media, every lie they write gets read by the general population. People still (for some reason, probably because there's no other established alternative) trust them, and most don't have time to evaluate the claims critically. They form beliefs based on lies, and then they act based on those beliefs. In democracies, they go and vote based on those beliefs.
So suddenly, that pile of bullshit I carefully avoid to read gets amplified and hits me anyway, in form of bad policy, bad social projects and, well, bad zeitgeist.
Then educate people. Educate the people who are writing the "bad" stuff in the first place. Educate the people who are making the policies. Become the educator and the policy maker and be the change you want in the population. That's how you fix things.
But complaining about what people should consume because you deem it unworthy seems arrogant, draconian and irrational.
YMMV, I suppose we may be browsing different parts of the Internet, but I know content I love would mostly stay intact. From my personal and subjective experience, nearly everything that is actually worth anything on the Internet is made by unpaid volunteers for whom creating content is an end in itself, and not a way to earn money. Wikipedia? Check. HN discussions? Check. Topical subreddits? Check. Tutorials, videos, articles? Check, check, check. In fact, over time I've noticed a strong negative correlation between trustworthiness of content and amount of ads around it.
Heck, myself I created lots of such content and always felt it should be distributed for free.
Sure, videogames, music, movies, etc. are a different story. They are products that usually require full-time engagement of skilled professionals and you can't really get around paying for those. But your average web page? Rule of thumb: the more ads it projects, the more likely it is that it exists only to earn money off you (quality or dependability of content be damned).
TL;DR: I don't mind if upon removing ad support half of the Internet goes to shit. It was the bad part.
Oh, and since someone will surely bring up New York Times - I say, let it burn. Let's be honest with ourselves, we all know mainstream media are 1% content, 99% combination of bullshit and malicious lies. I'm willing to support that 1% with cash, but not the 99%. It is harmful to society and it should die.