Who is the little guy, and why are we optimizing for him, instead of making the world better for everyone?
I mean, I think the link tax is backwards, but a vague emotional appeal to the health of... a mom and pop internet news site...(?) is not the argument I'd use.
Internet is supposed to be THE free platform a mom and pop internet news site can prosper. You are, at this very moment, here in HN, in a mom and pop internet news site.
Nothing fundamentally has changed about HN as Y Combinator has become more successful over time. Your premise pretends that both HN's long-term and initial success rests on the present riches of Y Combinator - that's false.
HN runs on one server and is moderated by just a couple of people typically. It is in fact the definition of a mom & pop operation. It does not have a zillion dollar budget, either for operations or promoting itself. It doesn't need it, the value proposition is the content, community and standards.
I can semi-trivially set up an HN clone for any given industry or concept. It'll be up to me to promote it and garner attention to it, however the point is that it's extremely inexpensive and easy (few regulations, hurdles, compliance issues, etc) to open up that type of expression platform. That's what the parent is referring to.
It's not about who the mom is, or whether she is a billionaire. HN is read mostly by tech workers, which is probably not more than 5% of US population and probably less than 1% of internet users. These numbers are out of my ass, but is there any indication that HN is mainstream media? HN is a niche media like my sister's blog.
I think 1% of the USA is generous. We're talking about mostly programmers and software engineers here. I doubt the level 2 tech support at Comcast is reading HN, much less any significant percentage all IT workers.
FWIW I'm closer to the L2 Comcast tech than programmer and I was introduced to HN by my dad, a DBA. I thought HN was for the intellectually curoius, not just the coders and programmers of the Valley?
I was homeless for nearly 6 years and an active participant. I'm also not a programmer, though I have a Certificate in GIS and, these, days, make part of my money as a "webmaster."
There are a lot of IT people here. This, unfortunately, sometimes convinces some individuals that that's all there is here, which is an inaccurate assumption.
> Internet is supposed to be THE free platform a mom and pop internet news site can prosper.
The internet has the attention economy, which follows a power law of popularity, with a long tail of unpopular content that has <50 readers. I would not consider that 'prosperous'.
Optimize for the little guy so there can be growth. "Better for everyone" is stasis because "everyone" includes all the people that already have disproportional slices of pie.
To be fair, google and the like have been living off scraping third-party content and making it available in a way that only the scrapers see any traffic from that content, thus earn anything that is there to be earned.
In this scenario, I'm not sure if society should encourage little mom and pop scrapers to spawn while leaving the people who actually created the content with any way to protect their work.
The problem is that people don't want what (most of) the newspaper publishers are offering, they want smaller, broader, differently curated summaries of that.
"Publishers" (newspapers) are 99% simply reprinting news they get from "the wire" (Reuters for example, or Bloomberg, or ...), or a few wire services. One way to look at Facebook and Google News is that they are better versions of these wires, available for end users of the content instead of just paying subscribers (Reuters' wire is a subscription service)
The way it works is this: let's say I feel the need to put out a press release. I have an employee write the news (heavily favoring me) and "put out the press release", meaning I submit the article to a news agency [1], including image and text online, paying 35$ for the privilege of having it appear on the feeds newspapers use to put out news. This is why even the BBC is full of "researchers working for IBM have saved the world again".
There are a number of issues. Of course 99% of the news is not exactly neutral or even a little bit researched, because it's just press releases. 1% is, but is produced by reporters working for the news agencies (only huge places like BBC still have their own reporters). And Google is a lot better than even the BBC (which is very high quality) at finding and presenting press releases to the public. Hell, it's actually better at deciding the trustworthiness of them than news desks (mostly because they, for profit reasons, refuse to give humans even half an hour to check things). Furthermore, those algorithms run so cheaply that they actually provide a personalized version of the news of the day based on both your interests and the news. I assume Jeff Bezos has the same service by a newspapers, but I imagine few others do.
So the underlying issue newspapers are having is "Google automated and Facebook crowdsources what we do, and their automated algorithms are much more successful than our humans, please outlaw them".
> To be fair, google and the like have been living off scraping third-party content and making it available in a way that only the scrapers see any traffic from that content, thus earn anything that is there to be earned.
Yeah there is no value at all in having a searchable index, content summaries, and it's unfair that people get paid for that. Furthermore newspapers just use humans to do what Google news does with algorithms. Never mind that that's what people want.
And as pointed out, people see more value in the aggregated, summarized and algorithmically curated versions of the same data.
Did you ever use the phonebook ? Did it have ads or not ? Should we outlaw the phonebook too ? Did you ever use an encyclopedia or a dictionary ? Did you pay for it ?
Honestly, it doesn't seem a bad thing to me. But lat's see how Google plays it out.