I don't think I will read anything else this insightful today. Would I pay for this thread? Absolutely. Would I pay $19.99/month for HNPREMIUM where I could read "the full thread" of top content providers like mjburgess? Nope.
Well I can comment with authority on my motivations. I can expand your point further than you made it.
I am posting here because its free for you. I'm posting here to participate in an open forum, I am donating my time to the people here, in conversation -- not to HackerNews itself. Which has my loyalty only insofar as it is the "public space I want to visit".
So if you were to have paid anything for that thread, I wouldnt have started it.
And likewise I have never posted to any internet forum behind a paywall and I find the idea practically and morally suspicious. All the places worth going to are run by those with a passion for them -- it is that passion which they want to share.
Thanks for expanding. I think for me I get confused with getting a lot of value out of something that's free, user friendly and highly moderated (self moderated and actively) and wanting to show that I value that. Naively it would be that thing "money" in some way or another. But the gotcha is, it's lots of these little threads where a writer is going out of their way to shed insight on something and it clicks for me (aka great value). So I would have kinda liked to give post facto user driven "tips", but then imho micro transactions perverts incentives on a micro individual level. So you might still say all these things you said now (without any chance of getting "a coffe" or a couple of "bits") but you could also start to change your tone to make it stand out more, to provide "better content", so you spice up your takes and act more distinguishable to get tips. Or as in your case, stop posting all together. So I don't want micro transactions here even if I sometimes actuall would like to pay someone thanks somehow.
I get value out of clarifying my thoughts amongst people capable of refining them -- the membership fee is "something to say" and the reward is "something to read".
I'm quite capitalist myself, but for my own passions, an elite socialist -- that is, of course the value to me ought be non-financial; and likewise, to you.
A kind of "collective elite" is very intuitive for one's owns passions --- but it wont get you an economy.
But I dont wish to turn my thoughts into an economy. My words pay their own way.
This speaks very well to something that's been bugging me about these discussions. marginalia_nu posted a blog about community yesterday that got linked here and you're hitting on a topic related to that. When the value is in the community itself, not the location they happen to be gathering in, how should ownership and funding of that location work?
In reality, we've got several options. People have house parties. One or several members of the community volunteer property they already own and maintain for another purpose to be temporarily used as a gathering place. The web analogy would be if we all had our own private blogs that we ran on self-hosted servers and we moved from the comments section of one to another and had our discussions there. Classically, Usenet was basically this but without the web.
Commons exist. These would be something like a park. That can be funded via taxes, or if you're militantly anti-government, via some more voluntary form of communal funding, like an HOA or a non-profit that accepts donations. The web equivalent of the latter would be something like Wikipedia, which could easily host threaded discussions if they wanted to. It's arguably a problem that nothing like the former really exists. A lot of people in the past several years have been saying platforms like Twitter deserve to be treated as equivalent to government-provided commons, so why not just have them actually owned and funded by the government? Ironically, the US government does own and operate a classified Twitter clone called eChirp, but nobody from the web can access it unless they have a JWICS account, workstation access, a security clearance, and IC PKI identity.
When thought about this way, do private for-profit parks exist? I know amusement parks exist, but they are clearly different. The value there isn't in going to see the other park guests who you know and would gather with anyway. The park itself is the attraction, filled with entertaining rides, shows, and restaurants that play off of brand loyalty and nostalgia. It feel like places like Facebook and Reddit want to make the same or even money compared to Disney, but without putting in the century of work to build a brand and back-catalog of high-quality entertainment franchises. So they rely on users to generate content instead and it's at best a shitty, ephemeral attention grab that nobody will look back on in 2120 and cherish.
What many of us want are parks, public parks with funding models, not amusement parks with business models, let alone shitty copycats of amusement parks where all the rides suck, but we go anyway because our friends are there and we have no regular parks to hang out at.
The parent commenter you're replying to here is effectively proposing I should get paid to hang out with my friends. I don't want to get paid to hang out with my friends. As soon as that happens, they're not friends. They're customers and I just became a business. I don't want to be a business. I'm just trying to talk, not generate monetizable content.
Unfortunately, if you don’t want your data “monetized” through creepy tracking and annoying ads, and you’re also completely unwilling to pay, then you’re going to have a bad time.
Storage, compute, and bandwidth all cost money, and it has to come from somewhere.
You're wrong. Things can be publicly funded. They can be sponsored. Wikipedia does no creepy tracking and the only annoying ad is when Jimmy Wales is begging for money (even though they have the funds to run the company for 10 years without receiving another penny right now).
Your mindset of "everything costs money and so everyone is the internet's paypig" is broken and exemplifies the problem with the modern internet.
Yes, everything costs money, but honestly, not that much money. $20-$40 a month is enough to run your own kbin/lemmy/mastodon instance on a VPS with your own domain name and everything. If you have 300 regular users, getting them to throw $500 a year in support at your site is nothing.
Also, if you occupy a niche and run it well, you can make internet money the old fashioned way, by finding products that your niche users specifically want and organically selling to them without ad spamming them to death.
Yes, that means money changes hands. That's capitalism. But in that system the site users are not being spammed with annoying ads and the only tracking being done is with the interest category itself and not on a per user basis including all of the other sites they've ever visited before visiting your site.
Just like forums used to do.
Sure, forums are outdated because the site navigation is clunky and user participation is difficult, but federated systems can bridge the gap between the forum based glory days and the modern interface without costing everyone so much money that it boggles the mind.
> Also, if you occupy a niche and run it well, you can make internet money the old fashioned way, by finding products that your niche users specifically want and organically selling to them without ad spamming them to death.
Yes, that's usually how it starts. It ends with invisible tracking pixels and flashing X10 ads everywhere. That or stealth ads disguised as content.
This isn't some hypothetical. We have 30 years of history now to tell us exactly how this plays out.
> Just like forums used to do.
That era was great while it lasted. But since the "adpocalypse", it's very very difficult for sites to make money without targeted ads and the requisite tracking. We lost a lot of high-quality sites like Dr Dobbs Journal in the adpocalypse, and all we have to replace them are SEO content farms and blogspam.
I know I'm working with the Good King hypothesis where things are great as long as a good king sits on the throne, and I also don't know many people who if they were running a federated server that was just scraping by were suddenly offered a boatload of cash to throw some ads in or to hock some shiny new toy for people wouldn't take it (even if they would be transparent about it the way Linus Sebastian does).
Despite that, I think ads will probably evolve to fit the new ecosystem, where two people like you and me are having a conversation and I will at an appropriate time and with a proper amount of discretion mention (shiny new toy) and that (I'm enjoying it) and then move on.
Annoying, blaring in your face spite ads and out of place porn ads will change, the new ads will be powered by AI personas that match their online spaces, have appropriate day night cycles and backstories, and will be practically indistinguishable from real live humans and they will occasionally gather together and talk excitedly with each other about (shiny new toy) or how (Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs' new birthday cake cereal recipe) is (awesome) and then us real human will stumble onto that conversation (without the parenthesis), leaving us to wonder if we should give them a try.
And if someone were to offer me thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue to host a site that seems hustling and bustling with activity that is appropriate for the space where sometimes people will be urged to get into flame wars about how (Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs' new birthday cake cereal recipe) is (Better than / not as good as) (Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs' Original recipe), thus preventing any conversation about (Plain old Oatmeal for breakfast) then who wouldn't take that?
I can’t exactly pinpoint what it is about this but I can’t help feeling that there’s a certain irony in you taking a screenshot of a perfectly readable, accessible post on here and posting that as (to my mind) a less readable less accessible, decontextualised piece of content - an image on an image sharing site.
Is it because people will genuinely engage with that content there?
Is it a “this is such good content I’ve captured it for posterity - look here’s the proof!” type of endorsement?
Or is it an attempt to archive the content into some sort of collective memory? Or an aide memoire for your own purposes?
Genuinely curious to understand your motivation, it’s not a criticism of what you’ve done, just something I feel I don’t understand.
You're right and sorry, It was just a online way of me enthusiastically pointing at a thing and trying to say: This is value, just a snippet of text on a pale yellow background, where no-one were actively trying to create this value. I can't really put my finger on what I'm trying to say though so i guess that is the root the confusion. :D Like, I don't get paid for this content so it doesn't have to make sense.
edit: also I use greenshot so it's too easy for me to screenshot and get an imgur-link. And yes, I'm a screenshoter, sending my colleagues images of text all the time. I'm lucky to be alive still.
Please don’t apologize, your approach is pretty normal - I probably send a dozen screenshots around per day and it’s always easiest to just show people what I’m referring to directly with an image.
Hacker News has pretty easily accessible URLs for every comment.
Just click on the timestamp next to the comment, like "12 hours ago".
Sending the actual HN url to a comment or thread, instead of a screenshot:
* Is accessible to people with limited vision who can't or can't as easily read a screeshot. Many people even without vision impairment find text much easier to consume than a photo of text. For instance, text in reasonable CSS will flow to fit your screensize, where a screenshot will not.
* For those interested, easily provides the context of where the comment/thread appeared and what's around it, hard to trace back from a screenshot to HN
* For the future archival purposes, is often more likely to still be good than a link to a third-party image hosting site
* In the rare case where it matters, is "self-authenticating", it points to HN itself, while an image can be modified or faked, although certainly in most cases there is no motivation for someone to do so, still it's nice to have it built in.
When it's an HN comment, or anything else with a URL, I think it should be nearly as easy to show people what you're refering to with a URL to it, as it is with a screenshot?
I don't think I will read anything else this insightful today. Would I pay for this thread? Absolutely. Would I pay $19.99/month for HNPREMIUM where I could read "the full thread" of top content providers like mjburgess? Nope.