[zdkl]

I don't like this stereotyped answer but isn't this what "move fast and break things" was supposed to be about?

Why did we become afraid to diverge from the norm and trends on the internet? From a consumer standpoint, uniformisation makes content parsing easier in the sense that you know what to expect and how to compare content more readily but why do people not go on a limb and take more "risk" in differentiating content? Why don't we have a glorious mess of different formats and the opportunity to choose medium?

At some point I believe A/B testing and optimising for reachability put a negative pressure on variation from the norm and platform standards, and that's a tragedy of the commons.

[Veen]

> Why did we become afraid to diverge from the norm and trends on the internet?

Because “we” wanted to get rich, or at least make a living.

[zdkl]

Well we can't all make a living as authors or librarians. Ads supported this delusion for a while but historically most people trying to live from their creativity/written work (or modernly, video work) have actually starved to death.

If you're in it to get rich or to mke a living exclusively from your art, you better be good enough rather than expecting a sense of duty from your public to subsidise your effort.

Not to say one shouldn't be incentivised to be creative, but just that I do not agree that wanting to make a living makes ads or extracting value from your public by all means ok.

[Veen]

> makes ads or extracting value from your public by all means ok

Certainly not by all means. But it isn't unreasonable to expect that if people gain value from something you create, some of that value accrues to you as the creator.

I make most of my living as a freelance writer, but I just charge other people to write the content they can't or won't.

There is also another problem here: the market doesn't typically incentivize the sort of content we'd like to see created. Long form investigative journalism is hugely expensive, and in a world awash with free content, few people think they should have to pay for it. But do we really want to see that sort of content go away?

[zdkl]

The use-case you describe as freelance writer or proper investigative journalism is the one place I expect targeted (and author curated) advertising to be able to pay the bills in the ideal market-fit theory. If as an author and "provider of opinions" you can't convince commercial actors in your niche to funnel value to you, I'd argue you shouldn't be writing non-fiction commercialy.

And in this not strictly commercial writing context, I believe client side mining may be a good form of low-commitment compensation.