[ndynan]

This pattern is purely a representation of how financially hurt news institutions are. They are desperate to make revenue and the end user experience is sacrificed in the name of keeping the ship afloat (and sometimes profit).

[hellbannedguy]

I'm to the point I'd like to see them go 501c3 nonprofit.

Admit defeat.

Get used to just making a barely livable income, like the rest of us.

Stop begging. Stop the obnoxious ads. Stop the shady subscription schemes. Enough with the .99 cent for six week promos. We obviously don't value you enough to give your access to our debit cards.

Newspapers you lost the war.

The sooner you realize it the better.

Follow the PBS model at this point.

(And I realize the importance of non-biased news. I wouldn't mind seeing tax money going to certain high quality organizations.)

[antisthenes]

Right. The issue is twofold - in the internet era, the marginal utility of any additional news source is near zero.

Sure, you might cross-check an article once in a blue moon, but most people consume news through a link that was sent to them by someone inside their bubble. And once they read the headline, there's 0 reason to click to another link with the same story ever again. So the links might as well be hosted in one place, say NY times or CNN. It doesn't really matter where.

The second part of the issue is that the barrier to entry into modern "journalism" evaporated with the advent of social media. You no longer need to own a printing press, or self-host a blogging platform even.

Have a twitter account? You're a journalist! Have a twitter bot that follows a bunch of local news sources? You're a newspaper! No longer do you need to own a printing press or an editorial staff. Want an "Opinion Section"? Tweet something that sparks outrage and watch angry replies pour in!

The only remaining barrier to entry is high-end investigative journalism-whistleblowing. And that's always been a tiny niche and hard to monetize.

[0898]

The barrier to entry into modern "journalism" evaporated with the internet. All Matt Drudge did was post links to other people's stories.

[chrisrogers]

Don't forget the far more common access barrier. The White House press room and its analogues only hold so many people.

[Joakal]

There needs to be a politician-journalist. Elected in second place who:

- Keeps the 1st place winner on their toes

- Reports to the losing voters

- Can do local news

- Can talk to people

Otherwise, all those hopeful candidates go back to focusing on their living and leaving those "losing" voters without any representation (seriously, how can there be no representation for the leftover votes and assuming they're not rich).

[jeffe]

The New Yorker has always had high quality investigative journalism (albeit with varying levels of left leaning bias depending on the writer) in my opinion, and seems to be quite doing quite well.

[chrischen]

I don't think tech workers are making barely livable incomes.

[epicureanideal]

Many of our parents had better lives overall despite less education, fewer hours worked, shorter commuting distance, etc.

Yes, tech is better than most other jobs, but most tech jobs just give you the middle class life many people had 20-30 years ago (aside from the tech gadgets that didn’t exist 20-30 years ago that even the poor have now). In terms of large expenses and free time rather than gadgets, we’re no better than the middle class of the last generation.

Which is and should be disappointing given that it’s one of the best jobs available.

[mavhc]

I work in education, so not highly paid, bought a car and a house by myself, and easily manage to save £500/month.

I just don't waste my money on stupid things like paying other people to make my sandwiches and drinks, or gadgets that are priced as 10x what they cost to make.

[epicureanideal]

Can you give more information? Are you in London or another major city in the UK?

[mavhc]

Midlands, city suburb.

My house is better than my parents where I grew up to start with, my car is electric, I have free electricity from the sun, a TV larger than anyone could imagine back then (with films for £1 with the same quality as a cinema), I can communicate with almost anyone on the planet, via video, for free (including free translation), I can buy a computer like on Star Trek that I can talk to for £20, life is magical.

[ZeroGravitas]

I think that comment was aimed at web publishers and legacy news corps.

However, I think there's still a bunch of niches that can be exploited, to both personal and societal benefit, if you explicitly give up on becoming a billionaire with a monopoly over locked in users.

Basically, find something that would be a Billion dollar global business, and then do it on a small local scale in a non-user hostile way.

Think about all the negative things you (or rather the self-directed corporation you create) would do once you've locked in your audience to get those billions (more intrusive ads, clickbait, adding gambling elements to your kid focused app etc.) Then actively prevent yourself from doing them via some kind of organisational structure, like a B corp or non-profit. In game theory terms, this is burning your boats to force yourself to go in a specific direction even if tempted to retreat.

This lets people buy into the idea without the feeling that they're going to get stabbed in the back later.

Do all the things a genuinely user focused company would do if they weren't afraid of going out of business.

You might not be able to employ thousands of marketers, salesmen etc. but can you make a decent software salary without slaving for an ad business? Being able to locate anywhere, work for yourself and possibly have tax benefits of running a charity may swing the decision.

If enough geeks do this, you could end up with some co-operative federation of small independent orgs, like a version of GNU, Linux, Unix for replacing the current web's Facebook's and Amazon's, just as they did to Solaris and Oracle.

I have no idea how rich Linus is for example, but I'd guess 99.9% of nerds would happily switch to being him or small scale version of him.

At the moment most of that energy seems aimed at VC backed small companies that use the "changing the world" motivation and then later sell out.

Co-ops in a variety of industries, fair-trade, ethical makeup and others have developed similar models with reasonable success, someone just needs to perfect the formula for user facing web apps.

[DarylZero]

Making it in free software is like making it as an author. You need to achieve some kind of fame to get paid. You need to be an internet celebrity. Then you can raise money.

> I have no idea how rich Linus is for example, but I'd guess 99.9% of nerds would happily switch to being him

LOL, yes, this represents the 1 in 1,000,000 extreme of programmer celebrity that is far more than anyone could reasonably hope for.

[charwalker]

One data point here. Floating ok most months while otherwise doing well.

[mhb]

There's nothing magical about non-profits that would fix any of these problems.

[southerntofu]

How is becoming non-profit a "defeat"? I would argue society would fare much better if all work was for the profit of society and not (capitalist) profit.

Also, why don't we tech people lead by example and build non-profits and cooperatives that provide better software/services? See for example the successes of framasoft, sourcehut...