[realusername]

Advertising is directly contributing to the increase in polarization. If you want to get ad revenue, you have to produce in increasing quantities every year (by directly reducing the quality of the content) and use shady tactics like clickbait and polarizing topics to increase page views.

None of those issues apply to paid journalism.

[dialtone]

Are you perhaps misunderstanding how the newsfeed works? People can write all clickbait they want, always have, but it wasn't until that content was forced in your face by Facebook's newsfeed algorithm, or youtube recommendation algorithm or twitters feed algorithm that you are really exposed to that stuff.

And even without clickbait stuff people search for the news that satisfies them and their value system.

All of this happens on data voluntarily shared with the platforms people complain about like Facebook, and there's no end to this in sight.

Advertising in this forum is at the same time useless and barely works (cue the 50% advertising is wasted, don't know which one, and other similar sentences) and the most powerful tool for mind control ever existed.

[realusername]

Facebook and Youtube are also powered by advertising and suffer from the exact same issue. Content producers using these platforms have an incentive to create the maximum amount of content they can and use polarizing topics to get more views.

Any revenue model based on the number of views (like advertising) is fundamentally flawed and will suffer from the exact same problem.