[jolan]

Just reeks of being a whiny niche webfotainment consumer.

> I've really loved listening to SoundCloud over the past couple years since mainstream radio sucks, for the same reasons that mainstream TV used to (needing to target the lowest common denominator so as to not upset advertisers.)

Boohoo, now my favorite sites are going mainstream since I spend hours on their sites/consuming their bandwidth and they need to cover costs.

Alexa time on site:

facebook: 21:23 reddit: 18:30 youtube: 17:52 tumblr: 12:46 twitter: 7:41 soundcloud: 4:24

That's an hour and a half of a person's day.

> There have to be business models that allow the creativity of sites like XKCD, Reddit, SoundCloud, and Tumblr, to flourish. There has to be a way to save the walled garden of bland banality that the internet is becoming.

But you're still going to these sites despite the banality.

> Who's doing this to my internet?

You are.

> But most importantly, who will solve it?

Consider nominating yourself.

[canadaduane]

I know you're trying to be helpful by pointing out what's wrong with the author's perspective, but I think you're missing the main point--that there is no business model today that aligns well the needs and "digital rights" of the individual. Eventually, all of the good intentions of internet startups are subsumed by their business models (usually an advertising model), which only incidentally aligns with some of the needs of human beings.

I don't read it as a violin story, nor as a complaint--more of an attempt to define the problem and serve as a banner calling like-minded people together.

[rickg17]

Sure there is. People can pay for the products made by a business. Individuals don't have a right to the products that others make; if they want to have those products and don't want ads, then they need to ante up and pay money for the product and that money needs to be enough that the creator of the product can keep creating more products and support the customers who've already bought.

[chaqke]

This is definitely a valid problem for anything strongly driven by a network effect. If you buy your widget and pay for it, it's not a problem, but if the product is only cool when many people produce content on it, then it get many people by being free-at-first.