Patreon has pretty much already taken that spot.

A bigger concern with that model is that then Netflix of news or whatever gets to choose what you see. We'd have the Netflix of news with their own baked-in bullshit leading the charge regardless of how shit it was. Esoteric sources would die and popularity would rule that space.

That assumes either all sites on the web deserve equal compensation for their acts, or some body can decide what the relative value of each is and compensate each creator accordingly. You’d go back to having click farms, but they’d claim the government owes them a billion dollars for their high traffic.

Even the government would usually prefer that citizen money go directly to the systems that they prefer to support, rather than go through taxes to a government program that sponsors them (that’s why you get tax deduction for transit usage and charities). That second route is just needlessly complex.

There’s also better models for payment than microcharges. No one wants to consciously spend 5 cents in an online action. YouTube could require users to be subscribers to view or upload certain forms of content, or each individual creator would integrate some form of Patreon setup. A really simple solution would be to divide someone’s monthly subscription fee based on who they watched most that month.

Just saying they're a bit terminally online.

The oldest consumer complaint is from approximately 3800 years ago and is a clay tablet complaining about the copper they received from Ea-Nasir. (A meme you might have seen around, even if you didn't know that context)

Ancient Egyptians were around long enough they were doing archeology on Ancient Egyptians. There's plenty of science and engineering in China and Africa that predates Pythagoras' weird cult. (Srsly, if you're not familiar with the cult of Pythagoras, highly recommend)

Printing existed a long time before the printing press. But woodblock printing lacked responsive design so we're definitely being too generalized.

I'm saying you're responding incoherently to people making fun of you because you can't tell they're giving you shit for your bad take.

I'm saying you're pick and choosing your battles so you can feel bad about the modern world while ignoring the fact that you're a part of the growing movement against the corporate web.

The corporate hatred you have isn't new. Infinite growth isn't sustainable and the awareness of that is growing.

Newspapers, books, music, TV, aren't dead, they've continuing to evolve and independent creators are producing more worthwhile works than I'll ever make it through. And all of those were "dead" before the internet. "Video killed the radio star" after all. But, we've seen several newsrooms destroyed as not-profitable enough, only to get restarted as employee owned newsrooms. There's never been a better time to be a patron of the arts or a music fan.

Even so, the world doesn't exist online. Talk to people in your community. You'll feel better and the work and art they're creating is more impactful than "content".

My neato.

Guy replies with a hyperbolic shitpost about capitalism.

OP replies sincerely.

I reply hyperbolically in turn.

You assume I'm serious, then assume media can only mean "the mass news media" while ignoring any subtler parallels about access to information and adoption. (e.g. Does reading and writing being expensive relate to the early internet where access and hosting were expensive? Does the evolution of the written word have parallels with the evolution of the internet?)

If I'm responding semi-seriously, I do want to note that it's only in the American school system where there's no writing until the west gets paper. Armies of scribes carved into stone, impressed into clay, and wrote onto vellum to blanket empires in written news.