this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
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If sites (especially news outlets and scientific sites) were more open, maybe people would have means of researching information. But there's a simultaneous phenomenon happening as the Web is flooded with AI outputs: paywalls. Yeah, I know that "the authors need to get money" (hey, look, a bird flew across the skies carrying some dollar bills, all birds are skilled on something useful to the bird society, it's obviously the way they eat and survive! After all, we all know that "capitalism" and "market" emerged on the first moments of Big Bang, together with the four fundamental forces of physics). Curiously, AI engines are, in practice, "free to use" (of course there are daily limitations, but these aren't a barrier just like a paywall is), what's so different here? The costs exist for both of them, maybe AI platforms have even higher costs than news and scientific publication websites, for obvious reasons. So, while the paywalls try to bring dimes to journalism and science (as if everyone had spare dimes for hundreds or thousands of different mugs from sites where information would be scattered, especially with rising costs of house rents, groceries and everything else), the web and its users will still face fake news and disinformation, no matter how hard rules and laws beat them. AI slops aren't a cause, they're a consequence.
Nice incoherent rant bro
You know that people used to pay for newspapers right? Local tv news was free on maybe one or two channels, but anything else was on cable tv (paid for) or newspapers.
We WANT news to cost money. If you expect it to be free to consume, despite all the costs associated with getting and delivering journalism (let's see, big costs just off the top of my head: competitive salaries, travel to news worthy sites, bandwidth to serve you content, all office space costs, etc), then the only way they can pay for it is to serve outrageous amounts of ads in tiny, bite sized articles that actually have no substance, because the only revenue they get is ad views and clicks.
That is NOT what we want. Paywalls aren't bad unless we're talking scientific research. Please get out of the mindset of everything should be free, don't sneer at "authors need money" mf they DO if you want anything that's worth a damn.
Have you ever heard about "donation" and "voluntary"? Wikipedia, for example, has no subscription, nor ads (except for banners asking for donation sometimes). Not everything has to orbit around money and capitalism, people can do things out of their will, people can seek other gains beyond profit (such as voluntary social working, passion, etc).
How much they costed? Some cents, differently from the 2-digit monthly costs of news outlets, which won't cover all the information needs, especially today when the world is more interconnected and "the flapping wings of a butterfly in Brazil can cause a typhoon in Pacific ocean" (the butterfly effect). Nowadays, things are interconnected and we must be informed about several fields of knowledge, which will be scattered across several, hundreds of different outlets. If one had too subscribe for every outlet out there, how much would it cost? Would the average monthly wage suffice for paying it? Especially vulnerable and emergent populations? (yeah, there are other countries besides USA and European countries; I live in Brazil, a country full of natural wealth but full of economic inequality, with millions of people having no restrooms at their homes nor access to water treatment, and that's the reality of a significant percentage of the global human population). That's my rant: not everybody is wealthy, and billions of people have to choose between paying subscriptions to be informed or buying food to eat, so... i dunno... they could keep... surviving. That's a reality, it doesn't matter If it's incoherent to you, but that's a reality. So every time you advocate for "news to cost money", you're advocating for keeping billions of people under the shadows of misinformation, even when this harsh reality is unbeknownst to you.