[hinkley]

Kinda had the same reaction, but if you went to your friend's house every week and drank all his beer an never gave anything back, eventually that would make you feel bad.

If I'm getting something that required skill and labor, 'moral fiber' suggests some quid pro quo. How are you going to reciprocate?

At some point someone observed "we can profit off of audiences" so that answer was "by being an audience member." But now it's kind of a mess, and either we haven't found a better model or inertia and collusion have prevented it from arriving.

[luke0016]

I'm not sure I really agree with the analogy, but there are other approaches that don't involve assaulting my senses. For instance, they could just flat out charge money for it.

On a tangentially related note, I think there's a special place in hell for the engineers that created gas pumps that display ads while fueling. Those things are pure, unadulterated evil.

[hinkley]

It would be better if your friend insisted you bring beer instead of launching into a sermon or his MLM pitch, sure.

But we’re talking about moral fiber. For some people “they hit me first” is not ethically sound. There’s some ambiguity here about who hit first, but rather than a fair exchange we are getting what is rapidly approaching brinksmanship. Nobody is really in the right here.

But we also can’t seem to just go back to a paid model for high production values. We are satisfied with amateur work and underpaid professionals slowly burning a nest egg and hoping something changes. The advertisers are the only ones with a hand out, so they get to set the agenda.

I had hopes Brave was going to alter this trajectory but there seems to be some regulatory capture there. i kind of wonder if they hired some ad people and charisma won over the origin story.