I remember that time of the internet too, and agree that that was a better time for independent creators. But people on random blogs weren’t breaking stories like the Panama papers, or the LAPD Rampart scandal, or anything that takes months or even years of investigation and interviews with sources. At the time, that was being paid for by the people buying newspapers, which people don’t do any more.
And I disagree that paywalls are part of enshittification. For me, enshittification is when a news outlet tries to stay “free”, covering their sites on ads and sponsored content, and puking out articles which are just lists of tweets, while having their articles written by unpaid interns or AI. See: the Independent, Evening Standard (both now owned by Evgeny Lebedev), and every single other paper that doesn’t implement a paywall. I know lots of people who have been driven out of the journalism profession because you just can’t make a living on it. Sure they can start a blog, but that won’t put food on the table, and it won’t allow them to spend huge amounts of time, and in many cases money, to actually get to the bottom of something that powerful people don’t want you to know about.
Enshittification doesn’t just mean charging for your services. It refers to when VC-backed startups use their vast funding to offer something for free, then make it worse and worse by trying to monetise it more and more. People deserve to be paid for their work. If you value their work, you should be paying them.
Sorry for the rant, I just really think that the reason journalism has taken such a massive nosedive in recent years is because hardly anybody is willing to pay for it. Similar to music: as a listener it sucked having to pay £12 for an album. But now on Spotify the artists are getting a pittance for something they’ve worked their whole lives to create.
I remember that time of the internet too, and agree that that was a better time for independent creators. But people on random blogs weren’t breaking stories like the Panama papers, or the LAPD Rampart scandal, or anything that takes months or even years of investigation and interviews with sources. At the time, that was being paid for by the people buying newspapers, which people don’t do any more.
And I disagree that paywalls are part of enshittification. For me, enshittification is when a news outlet tries to stay “free”, covering their sites on ads and sponsored content, and puking out articles which are just lists of tweets, while having their articles written by unpaid interns or AI. See: the Independent, Evening Standard (both now owned by Evgeny Lebedev), and every single other paper that doesn’t implement a paywall. I know lots of people who have been driven out of the journalism profession because you just can’t make a living on it. Sure they can start a blog, but that won’t put food on the table, and it won’t allow them to spend huge amounts of time, and in many cases money, to actually get to the bottom of something that powerful people don’t want you to know about.
Enshittification doesn’t just mean charging for your services. It refers to when VC-backed startups use their vast funding to offer something for free, then make it worse and worse by trying to monetise it more and more. People deserve to be paid for their work. If you value their work, you should be paying them.
Sorry for the rant, I just really think that the reason journalism has taken such a massive nosedive in recent years is because hardly anybody is willing to pay for it. Similar to music: as a listener it sucked having to pay £12 for an album. But now on Spotify the artists are getting a pittance for something they’ve worked their whole lives to create.