[kebolio]

Capitalism is why we can't have nice things in the first place. Capitalism precludes news media from reporting fairly and accurately rather than pander to their advertisers. Another example: want cheap fast internet? Too expensive to run fibre even though these corporations are making profits that run into billions and none of the US giants will have this so-called "common carrier" policy.

[pas]

It's not "capitalism", it's human nature. We like cheap stuff. And the bystander effect. It's free online, so someone else will surely solve it, pay for it, fund it, support it, etc.

[kebolio]

Yes, it is to do with "capitalism" and the product of a society geared towards making money instead of making cool stuff. It isn't immutable, there are better ways of doing things, but then again that's beyond the scope of the argument. :^)

[pas]

No, it's not. Capitalism is private ownership of capital, which means there's a whole lot of economic activity generated by thinking about what to invest in, which is just a blind optimization process.

Society could harness it for good or bad. We have cheap applied science things (microprocessors with radios and amazing magically touch sensitive displays without ugly cords with endless content and ability to just call each other anywhere* on the planet), and we have of course things like the great firewall of china (and turkey and so on) which do deep packet inspection, enabled by very similar technology companies.

But it's immutable. You can't choose the second best thing. Because that just means your preferences and thus your utility function values underdogs above topdogs, hence you'll see those as the best. It's just tautological. And sure, we'll probably climb out of this hole eventually, but maybe with things like patreon and co: http://alternativeto.net/software/patreon/ (for example AdBlock + Flattr seems like a good solution to the advertising hell)

Furthermore, just to talk about the original point of "capitalism is killing quality news" ... are you sure? I mean there are still quality news outlets, and there will be, but the problem is that people don't read them. And bias. Even if you could sign up to be a journalist and magically get a fixed income if at least 10 000 people are reading your stuff, there would be a lot more crazy/spam out there. _Because_ people are people, they cheat, they like easy solutions, they are greedy. They prefer easy explanations, they prefer silver bullets, they prefer gods and guns for law and order even if we know that education and equality is the answer.

[Shivetya]

Capitalism is exactly why you have nice things. Someone figures out what people want, how much they will pay, and then they go about providing it. Others catch on and compete and everyone benefits.

What is happening here is that too many bench warmers are trying to make excuses for why there are enough subscribers to the site. After all, all these people how can't they get a paltry 25k.

Simple, not that many people really know about their site and of those apparently the bulk just don't care. Maybe the content isn't really that interesting. Call a spade a spade.

then throw in, there is just such a wealth of information out there that it is easy to get lost and any one trying to sell stuff is going to have to work very hard to get noticed and even harder to make the sell.

Greed doesn't require capitalism, it occurs about any place where someone has stuff other people don't and where government leadership plays off the feelings of jealousy, income differences, and racial differences. Greed requires politicians who are more quite capable of telling you someone else has stuff you don't have and it is not fair or that you deserve stuff for free... provided you vote for them

[Spooky23]

Corporatism, not capitalism.

[kebolio]

What's the difference? Capitalism is always going to end up with consolidation, monopolisation and anti-user practices.

[Spooky23]

Capitalism is all about competition.

The magic of capitalism is happening in China right now. You have hundreds of manufacturers making everything, driving prices down.

In the US, we're more like a command economy in many ways. We have these huge sectors like healthcare and defense that are 100% top down procurement and probably represent 30% of the economy. Another 8% of the economy is financial services, which is mostly a small cartel with direct government supports.

The telecom situation is the same thing. The corporate idiots bake out risks and the US turns into a dinosaur. Lots of real innovation will start happening in Asia.