I remember really liking lifehacker when it was basically a blog.
I think the issue is that these sites don’t generate enough income for whole teams of editors and to be bought by media companies like ZiffDavis.
Maybe they are better now, that’s nice.
But I think what works is a single person or maybe 3 finding life hacks and writing about them.
I’m not even sure what lifehacker is supposed to write about now. But I think until they get back to someone’s passion project, they won’t be very good.
I think the issue is that these sites don’t
generate enough income for whole teams of editors
Unfortunately the challenge isn't just "make enough enough money to pay the writers and keep the lights on." They have to do that, and then make enough additional money to keep the corporate overlords happy and interested.
A great recent example is Defector Media, formed by the former staff of Deadspin (also of G/O media) who quit en masse and then formed their own employee-owned blog, Defector.com with minimal advertising and a direct reader supported revenue model. Direct reader support isn't the right model for every blog, but the larger lesson is that they were able to switch to a sustainable and spam-free format once they no longer had to pay the bills and generate some additional zillion dollars of revenue for their corporate masters.
"The company has 19 employees, each of whom own approximately 5% of the company"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defector_Media
Since their founding, they've offered annual financial updates and are doing well.
"Unfortunately the challenge isn't just "make enough enough money to pay the writers and keep the lights on." They have to do that, and then make enough additional money to keep the corporate overlords happy and interested."
Which rather well describes what just happened to DPReview. One wonders if some of the community there might be able to do something like this...
Does it? They host a ton of media content reached by most likely millions of page views with a full staff and little to no ads. I wouldn't be surprised if they've been running the site at a loss for most of its life.
This is my dream for a strong social safety net, maybe up to a UBI. If you could actually provide for people’s basic needs by default, people would lean in to passion projects like these. I think these are some of the most wonderful parts of being human.
This is my dream for a strong social safety net,
maybe up to a UBI
Amen. Many, many artists in the UK have commented how they could not possibly have pursued a career in the arts without the safety net of the NHS (National Health Service)
Arguably at least 3/5 of the greatest rock and roll hands of all time were British (Pick any of: Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Queen, Pink Floyd, Tne Clash…)
A very large percentage of the musicians in those bands were graduates of the “Art Schools” of the time, which were like STEM schools, just, well, art.
Yes absolutely. In my mind, the US has had a robust rock and pop history, but name an artist pre 2000 and a good chance they are from the UK. The US slays now with hip hop and r&b, but the UK has their own unique scenes like grime, which aren’t big in the states.
I don't know how we'd quantify that in any objective way.
Subjectively, it has 1/5 the population of the US and its influence is rather large.
But really, what's the counterargument here? We're not sure if it's good for artists to have healthcare? I'm not sure the quality of the "arts scene" is the right question to ask.
The more important question is how many people are unable to survive as artists in the US, and how much work is compromised just to make ends meet. This is also something that afflicts journalism to a very high degree in the US. Hence why certain topics are untouchable for US corporate media.
Says you. We're talking about public money being spent. I certainly don't agree that maximizing the number of people who can survive as artists is a good public policy goal. And I interpret "compromised" here to be producing something people want. That's vital, it's not a downside.
Fortunately providing healthcare to the public has public policy benefits besides maximizing the number of people who can survive as artists. It causes the population to have higher life expectancy, for one thing.
This is much easier to measure than who has the best artists.
This National Health Service is not a government program designed to promote the arts, so the issue of whether it "helps artists" is orthogonal to whether it is a good use of public funds.
That's just one of many, many examples, which I chose because the thread was already about artists. I also mentioned journalism, which you completely ignored.
These days that's changed somewhat in the US after the affordable care act. I just did the covered california calculator for my area, using an income estimate of $30k (less than what in n out starts at these days, honestly), medium use of doctor visits and prescriptions, and came up with bronze plans at $25 a month and silver plans at $75 a month.
It's changed a bit now, but back in the day in addition to free healthcare, you could get free higher education (actually the government would pay you), and free money for not having a job in the summer break.
Even the most generous UBI proposals are basically a “don’t starve to death” level of income. Maybe fine for a 20 year old who is couch surfing and working on their blog for a while, but UBI isn’t a realistic solution to free everyone from the need to work.
The idea of a UBI that provides a comfortable lifestyle for anyone who doesn’t want to work a normal job is just a pipe dream.
I think there's room to assume a little more steel in the man you're responding to.
The statement wasn't "UBI frees people from the need to work"; it was something more like "UBI might embolden people to pursue passion projects since they'd have reduced fear of financial ruin."
The latter seems plausible to me. I have personally decided not to pursue a startup idea because I didn't want to take a ride on the venture capital pain train, and I also didn't want to drop my income all the way to zero and start burning through my savings in order to do it. UBI might have changed that calculus.
I don't know how much it would even sway things. Rather than fear of financial ruin, you now have fear of having some of your best income earning years squandered doing something less fruitful. This is fear enough to keep people out of certain fields entirely today, especially if the payoff is late and uncertain relative to other more lucrative things you can be doing in your 20s and early 30s.
Even today, people do live like this, cheaply on a "basic" income to grind out a dream. Only instead of relying on ubi, they work part time at a restaurant while waiting for more work in their field to line up in the meanwhile perhaps, and take on roommates to cut rent in half or more. Would UBI mean those people no longer have to wait tables? Sure, but its not like the struggling actor suddenly gets more phone calls when they call off work for their other job, since they are taking the restaurant job in the first place because they have so much free time between jobs they might as well monetize it. Plus, someone has to wait the tables at the end of the day.
Opposite opinion, why should society fund your startup idea and take the risk if you couldn’t convince investors to back your idea or you don’t have enough confidence in your own vision to take the risk with your own savings?
That's not what UBI is about. The risk you take to pursue innovation shouldn't be the threat of complete personal financial ruin that you can't get out of for many decades.
It doesn't matter how confident I am in my vision. If the potential failure scenario is life-long debt and debilitating financial pain for my family and my children for their entire upbringing, anything less than 100% certainty might as well be 0%.
For many people, the decision is "I think this is a good idea, and could do very well, and could bring a lot of good to a very large amount of people, but good things fail all the time. If for some reason, the market decides not to take interest, or some competitor that has yearly turnover in the tens of billions of dollars decides to crush me, then I will be carrying the consequences of other peoples' decisions for the rest of my life, and my savings will be gone, and I won't be able to cope with even a minor medical situation, which is why I make sure to keep 5 figures in my savings account, because even with my medical insurance that I pay $1k monthly for, I can still lose up to $8k per year out of pocket, and medical insurance frequently decides to not even cover my needs anyway. I can't afford the time and effort to even sue them for what I need."
The US is not a good place for innovation unless you're already rich or the innovation is guaranteed not to fail.
That concern rings true even if you had UBI. The floor is higher, but you are still missing out on relative earnings bootstrapping something that isn't getting any more certain of succeeding.
- Because investors typically only care only about return on investment - not everything that's beneficial to society has a monetary return, or an immediately apparent monetary return (e.g. NASA investments have given some of the best returns ever, over time, but they didn't have the goal or apparent method of making returns at the start).
- Intelligent people are typically less confident than idiots, because they are more likely to be aware of additional potential risks/failure points. Confidence in an idea/vision is not necessarily a good indicator of anything and you're more likely to support an idiot's idea if confidence is your deciding factor.
- In the case of a UBI, it's not like the money is going to disappear. It will go immediately into securing basic needs, which will cycle the money back through the economy immediately and more likely at a local level.
1. Assumes one knows enough about the process for getting a grant that you could a) write a proper grant application (at least as well as an e.g. uninspired rando who knows nothing but the best ways to navigate the system) and b) knows where/when/how and to whom to submit the grant - assuming there is even a grant currently available that serves the purpose. So to recap, if we wanted to apply this to the number of people who could be freed up by a UBI, you would have millions or tens of millions of people writing grants instead of developing their ideas... after they figure out all the other aspects (additional time, energy, and money). Then you would also have a ton of other people reviewing these new grants. This does not seem better in any way. Instead of making it easier for creatives to bring their ideas to life, this adds additional burden to them and a bunch of other people.
2. This is the problem. If I have an idea that could revolutionize the world, but I suck at 'convincing people' or explaining the value of my idea, (according to you) I have nothing - thus everyone else loses out. Amongst the billions in the world, there could be untold millions who have the ability to improve the world with their work, but have no chance to develop it because they're working their asses off at dead end jobs just to stay afloat.
But hey, at least with your way we can make ourselves feel better about our successes, because we are capable of convincing someone with money that our idea might have merit.
So with UBI, how do you get your idea out there? How is that any different than music, ebooks, youtube videos or anything else that has basically zero marginal cost?
You may need to re-read the comment you are replying to.
I have underlying medical conditions, so like the parent poster I have decided against any startups because I need to tie myself to a corporate overlord so that they can pay my insurance premiums. Last time I checked Healthcare.gov I would have $26,000+ in medical bills each year. That’s a paywall for my health and well-being that would make an early startup so much harder. Taking a shock like the startup folding becomes truly traumatic. So I don’t. I sit in my cubicle so that I can stay healthy.
The parent poster was talking about this. In the US, failing a venture isn’t just “running out of money”. It can be really dangerous and difficult to navigate. Not that anyone should hand them money to fund a startup.
I'm really curious what plans you are looking at. From what I gleam on covered california out of pocket max are no higher than $8700 for most silver plans, some as low as $900. The plans offered seem pretty comparable to private corporate plans imo, and the premiums are affordable considering what is being offered. It would be easy to negotiate for a salary bump to cover your anticipated healthcare costs for a startup in tech I would imagine.
But they could then supplement that income with their blog. Once the bare essentials are taken care off, you have more options with low paying passion projects
Mine as well, being able to give advice about personal finances, computers, providing mentorship. Lifehacker used to be one of my favorite websites, it's a shame what it has become.
God, yeah. I miss that higher-quality version of LifeHacker. There was always fluff but the original incarnation was pretty cool.
I remember when the original founder (Gina Trapani) stepped aside, it sounded to me like she was burnt out on the "post 76786 updates a day, no matter what" business model that they'd found themselves stuck with... although, she was the one at the helm, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The idea of posting about multiple new "life hacks" per freaking day is just so obviously absurd. Life is hackable but not that hackable.
Hell, I wouldn't mind a much slower version of that site. 1-2 thoughtful articles a week. Then maybe 1-2 roundup posts of smaller news items.
I like that name! In the same vein I wish there were a site Slownews with, say, weekly or biweekly summaries & in-depth analyses of what's happening in the world (politics, economics et cetera). Sure, lots of things are happening around the world all the time but most of them are just noise. And even if they're not noise and very relevant to me, it usually takes the media a day or two to go beyond the breaking-news!-I-have-no-idea-what's-happening-and-yet-I-am-reporting-about-it quality level and piece together everything into a coherent analysis. But, by that time, no one is spelling out the essential facts anymore because journalists silently assume you've been following the 24/7 news cycle all along.
When Gina ran it, it was amazing. It was still a good site after she left. But later it became a US-only (whenever I looked at it, most things were only relevant to the US, if at all) almost-spam site, it was really sad.
Wow I’m just coming to the same realization. I used to love it anout a decade ago and suddenly realized I hated going there more and more til I stopped.
Same. They certainly took a big hit in quality after the Gawker lawsuit but even by then I’d stopped reading them on any regular basis.
Then there was Kotaku, their video game blog. It was the only site I ever got a comment ban on. I’d been a commenter for a few years, since the day they added them to the site. Then one day they posted a headline like “Pikmin comes to the DS” (or maybe 3ds I forget.) I click through and it’s basically a write up about someone who made a Pikmin picture/drawing using the handheld (something like that, my memory is vague on the details)
Which was annoying because Kotaku quality was generally not too click bait-ish and I said this in a comment. I got banned. I remember the editor who did it, Brian Crecente.
On the one hand their comments sections were generally non-toxic. On the other hand they had absolutely no tolerance, albeit sporadically applied, to critical opinions. Of course that’s their right, but it also made me wonder what other legitimate conversation they might be banning, and soured me on the site.
Despite this I’ll say Brian Crecente was a pretty good games journalist, and I kno many sites especially at that time were struggling with how to introduce comments without it turning into a waste dump.
Many of Gawker's best writers had already jumped ship to start indie projects by the time they seppuku'd by leaving that Hulk Hogan video up. Splinter News and The Awl were both started by ex-Gawker people.
Original Gawker may have been special but towards the end they had already become a lazy aggregator chasing Buzzfeed's audience.
This is why we need webrings again. It shouldn't take stumbling on a random internet comment by someone privy to the newsroom drama to figure out where the good journalism has ran off to.
I understand journalists need to pay the bills. Still, they are journalists, and they are in this field because they like journalism not because they like money. Often times today, they are freelancing anyhow versus working a regular position. You'd think there would be a little bit more passion projects going on outside of their freelance billpaying work. I know downtime is important too though and its a stressful job.
When I was in high school I wrote a very basic Mac app that pretty much just wrapped some Terminal commands in a GUI. Somehow it got enough attention to get a small post from Gina on Lifehacker, which helped translate into thousands and thousands of downloads. Seeing my dumb little app on Lifehacker was an incredibly cool moment that made me feel like I'd really accomplished something.
Here's hoping they can recapture some of the spirit of the old days.
It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for a site that was a garbage click generator to be accepted as a legit site. I wonder at what point you're better starting from scratch. If lifehacker.com comes up in a search now, I don't click, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
omg I remember todo.txt! I've kept that mantra alive with my own todo apps (private use only, I'm not selling myself here). I always build stuff that follows the same philosophy of "store everything in text files".
This looks good. I used to really like Lifehacker about a decade ago. When I looked at it again a few years ago I was deeply disappointed. The article sounds like they're trying to pivot away from being a spam farm and actually want to provide valuable content again.
On personal note, I had set lifehacker to automatically go into reader mode on iOS safari probably due to some time in the past wanting to read the content but fed up by how bad the site layout had gotten.
iOS is too “intuitive” to properly document and share documentation for all the features they provide. It’s got a wide variety of power user features that come and go, and this word of mouth thing is basically how you find out about them. Try and search for them and you’ll get documentation from 10 years ago that no longer applies, if you’re lucky.
They need to start shipping the documentation on the actual hardware. Imagine its 1995 and you try and release a bash tool that has no built in man file or documentation of any sort short of some page on your personal website. Bash users would probably call you a script kiddie and yell to get off their lawn.
Thats nice, but still not that ergonomic since you need to remember to now download a new book for whenever you upgrade your version. That could just be something shipped with the device in the settings menu perhaps to make sure you never have the wrong documentation in front of you.
I really used to enjoy reading lifehacker in years gone past. When Kinja happened, and then gawker imploded I gave up completely as by that point the articles had taken a turn for the worse.
I hope this offers the site a new start and they can do longer form articles now
At this point I'd prefer to show my support for Lifehacker by purchasing a hardcover compilation of their top stories and their comment threads. The best content is evergreen anyway.
It doesn't matter if the V3.0 of LH has done away with slideshows, something I thought the Internet abandoned in 2012. There is no way for a modern content-only website to survive without saturating every paragraph with affiliate link spam.
Yep, I was hoping to see more lifehacks and less politics, and it seemed to be the case... until now.
Il the last years, it was full blown propaganda for the US democratic party and against republicans, which brought a matching audience of political activists that I think that it off topic and even toxic. Keep it about lifehacks. Why can't republicans have good lifehacks? That should be a politically neutral topic.
> it was full blown propaganda for the US democratic party and against republicans
Really hard to blame Lifehacker, considering the damage done to legal precedent and other tomfoolery.
Oh, to be sufficiently privileged to be able to ignore the macroeconomic and political trends.
My grandparents taught me that politics aint about people. They learned that in the Depression. It's about existing power structures, deciding winners and losers. Demographically the GOP as a power player is living on borrowed time and doing everything it can to consolidate power and rebrand itself, in large part because its major three tents in its coalition (poverty-stricken disaffected [sometimes called eat-the-rich], business conservative, evangelical Christian) are not natural allies (as well as the latter two decreasing dramatically in both numbers and support). May the party of malcontent fail and more community-focused coalitions take the reins.
Funnily enough, most of the "trump obsessed" liberals are usually extremely privileged white people. I guess not having tons of actual issues and struggles in real life, and living a life of privilege makes it easy for people to look for "existential threats", and overdramatize/inflate the importance of relatively benign matters.
There is no bigger sign of privilege than to think you (not aimed at you! Just a general you) are saving democracy or fighting evil by being a vocal democrat in a liberal middle-upper class suburbia. I guess as a minority I just don't relate with the concept that ignoring politics, or not being obsessed by it, is a form of privilege when the absolute opposite is more the norm.
I am not against political propaganda in principle, I mean, it is at the core of freedom of speech and democracy. Just please keep it out of my lifehacks. Not only it is, I believe, off topic, but it also alienates about half of the US population.
We often talk about the virtues of diversity, but diversity is not just about LGBT and black people, it is also about diversity of opinion, and I think republicans (including Trump supporters) and democrats have a lot to share on the topic of lifehacks. Farmers for instance know their fair share of tricks, they also tend to be republican, and probably feel unwelcome to LifeHacker even though they would certainly be valuable contributors.
> Farmers for instance know their fair share of tricks, they also tend to be republican, and probably feel unwelcome to LifeHacker even though they would certainly be valuable contributors
The farmers and ranchers I know tend to run the full spectrum, so I'm not sure your stereotype of "common person must be GOP" holds.
To be fair, the article is "Why You Shouldn't Gloat (Even When It Feels Good)" and is using the recent news about Trump as a starting point to talk about why you shouldn't gloat.
It was to not have a cup until your natural endorphins from waking up have worn off - say around 10:30am. Whenever I have an earlier cup I seem to do less well.
Hopefully, lifehacker will again become a blog of life hacks rather than "your kid is trans and not yet know it" propaganda outlet. I definitely give them another chance under ZD ownership. Their current style is abysmal and even god damn tasteless.
Love it. It’s shameful that our country allows this crap to be sold. Someone who bought a homeopathic potion told me they thought that word meant ‘natural.’
You make it sound like lifestyle editors can just switch jobs to a better publication with a snap of their fingers. Also, it was probably not all bad from their point of view.
With all the drama surrounding newsrooms at odds with their penny pinching ownership, you'd think there would be more movements for the entire staff of a news agency to walk out entirely and just up and start a coop, working exactly as they were previously only without Tribune or whoever stepping on their neck. It's not like many are being paid great as it is so they wouldn't be taking much of an impact to their bottom line, plus over time maybe they'd end up making more with profit sharing agreements.
It sounds like Ziff Davis is giving them the freedom to remove them, and focus on more substantive content, rather than their previous owners, G/O Media, which forced them to deal with it for economics reasons.
The more substantive thing is the change-of-ownership, which should, in-theory, allow them to grow in a way that diverges from G/O Media (and formerly the Gizmodo/Gawker empire) strategy.
Lifehacker was interesting when it was mostly the single voice of Gina as their blog: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Trapani She would publish great articles about how she managed her personal information, used technology and tools, etc. As a blog it was great content. As a million and billion dollar business... I have my doubts.
I do think there is still a good future for a Lifehacker that goes back to high quality and interesting content from a small set of passionate voices. Too often on Reddit you get a hive mind where the group forms a consensus and any dissenting or alternate views are suppressed or ignored. It's nice to have something with a strong editorial team that can publish unique content based on the merits of its research, and not mashes of the upvote button.
Just gleaming the front page of /r/lifeprotips I have now learned how to remove superglue from my fingers... that doesn't scream hacker to me.
It's a common trope, but reddit has really taken a nose dive as the average user base grows to reflect the average population better. As George Carlin noted, the average person is kind of dumb, and half of all people are even dumber than that. On top of this race to the mean, you have advertisers who are increasingly aware of how many eyeballs are visiting the site, and the playbook for shilling and influencing sentiment on reddit is pretty textbook and reliable at this point, so a lot of content isn't really "genuine" anymore, especially on the larger subs with more eyeballs to monetize or influence.
Curation is the lifeblood of Reddit and some subs are insane in their quality and dedication. Maybe there are some in those subs who would contribute longer form content to Lifhacker in the future but the differing business models makes this unlikely in the near term IMHO
On the other hand, you can end up in situations where moderators are the only source of truth. The california subreddit is an example of this. 432k subscribers, yet the vast majority of posts come from a single moderator. At least they are posting mainstream news articles and not fringe content, but this seems to depend on one person with no check or balance.
Notably, they both coexisted back in the day, too.
If they seek to be an honest source of information they ought to stand out in modern net sources. We all know the hell of searching for info on google nowadays.
they definitely didn't coexist 15-20 years ago, which was maybe the reason I read LH back in the days, Reddit was founded less than 18 years ago and even in those first few years had hardly any users, started using it maybe 11 years ago and even then it was quite empty
stopped reading LH already before starting with Reddit
I mean that is a pretty low bar. Outside of reddit, "institutional" results like wikipedia or cdc.gov etc, and the occasional living fossil niche forum that has miraculously survived to this day, I can't say I've seen very many relevant results.
Usually I defer to reddit but sometimes even that is junk, and google tends to misdate ancient reddit threads as more recent. The best is when I identify a relevant forum on the first pass. Then I can append the site:forum.com tag and actually search the forum, because its internal search is probably ancient rate limited junk still.
Google makes a great search tool for parsing an individual or handful of websites like this, but its terrible of course when parsing the firehose of the modern web.
I think the issue is that these sites don’t generate enough income for whole teams of editors and to be bought by media companies like ZiffDavis.
Maybe they are better now, that’s nice.
But I think what works is a single person or maybe 3 finding life hacks and writing about them.
I’m not even sure what lifehacker is supposed to write about now. But I think until they get back to someone’s passion project, they won’t be very good.