[HN Gopher] Byrne Hobart on the financialisation of everything
___________________________________________________________________
Byrne Hobart on the financialisation of everything
Author : ubac
Score : 96 points
Date : 2021-10-27 18:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (thebrowser.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thebrowser.com)
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I had hoped that the continual advancement in electronics would
| mean the marginal cost of simply "putting something out there" on
| the internet would drop to near zero.
|
| While several platforms exist where a user can basically
| broadcast for 'free' (like on Twitter/Facebook/Medium/YouTube)
| all of that is still wrapped up in some kind of monetization or
| other scheme.
|
| I'm not naive enough to think a significant number of people
| would produce high quality content for free, but I do yearn for
| the days of the old 90's Netscape Composer websites that were
| chock full of information with no expectation of turning it into
| some kind of revenue stream.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Thing is masses of people make high quality content for free on
| all these platforms (and elsewhere) it's just next to no one
| gets to see it. Massive centralization happened because
| discovery of content is easier for the audience. But discovery
| of specific content has not gotten any better, if anything in a
| world curated by algorithm with much greater participation it's
| got significantly worse.
|
| The main issue is both monetization and distribution/discovery
| for digital content follow a power law. If you want to make
| something and have an audience you need to be one of the
| vanishingly small number of people that "make it". Otherwise
| you're just facing a massive uphill climb against entrenched
| people who hold all the cards.
|
| Right now if you want a good chance to get into a space you
| either need to have big resources behind you or to be one of
| the first movers into it. If you're some random person even if
| you make great stuff you stand next to no chance of blowing up
| because the entire audience is hovered up by the big names.
| This leads to people burning out en masse and their content
| being even harder to find.
|
| Basically we need more equitable discovery of quality content
| rather than just chasing metrics which leads to this
| entrenchment. And stable career paths for people.
| nullc wrote:
| > it's just next to no one gets to see it.
|
| It's not quite that bad, but our standards of success have
| changed.
|
| If your garage band threw a couple concerts and across them
| got and attendance of 1000 people that would have been a
| smashing success.
|
| Put your music on youtube and get 1000 listeners and it's a
| failure.
| agumonkey wrote:
| centralization also caused a natural pressure to prune all
| the mild content, it was inefficient (lots of politics and
| stuff like that) but it made a kind of ladder.. internet
| creates puddles, anybody can join, so they do and they had
| little value
| helen___keller wrote:
| > I had hoped that the continual advancement in electronics
| would mean the marginal cost of simply "putting something out
| there" on the internet would drop to near zero.
|
| This has happened even if you're excluding the usual ad-funded
| crowd. The difference is that supporting a billion users will
| obviously never be near zero cost, so any platforms with that
| level of usage are the ones with monetization streams (or are
| venture funded and will be monetized in the future, looking at
| you Discord).
|
| With that in mind you can actually self host at a near-zero
| cost, entry tier VPS instances are dirt cheap, and there's even
| cheaper choices if your content is simple enough (e.g. just a
| static HTML site). If you want to store a few GB of content,
| you can get that on a major cloud for very cheap. All of this
| together, you can get a significant amount of data hosted with
| many 9s of uptime on a large cloud for a scant few dollars a
| month. If you want to use your own hardware, you can buy a
| raspberry pi and get hosting ridiculously cheap.
|
| All that said, these options require technical expertise, which
| I think is the real failure. Lots of people have content but
| not the technical expertise to put it anywhere other than
| youtube/instagram/reddit/facebook/twitter
| simonh wrote:
| Companies like square space and wix will host your content
| for very little, and provide all the tools you need. Google
| Sites is free. I share content in Google docs.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-10-28 23:02 UTC)