| ▲ | nicbou 2 days ago | |||||||
As someone who is currently threatened by the Google Zero, thank you. This applies to recipes, but also to everything else that requires humans to experience life and feel things. Someone needs to find the best cafes in Berlin and document their fix for a 2007 Renault Kangoo fuel pump. Someone needs to try the gadget and feel the carefully designed clicking of the volume wheel. Someone has to get their heart broken in a specific way and someone has to write some kind words for them. Someone has to be disappointed in the customer service and warn others who come after them. If you destroy the economics of sharing with other people, of getting reader mail and building communities of practice, you will kill all the things that made the internet great, and the livelihoods of those who built them. And that is a damn shame. | ||||||||
| ▲ | Terretta 2 days ago | parent [-] | |||||||
> If you destroy the economics of sharing with other people OK... Someone needs to find the best cafes in Berlin and document their fix for a 2007 Renault Kangoo fuel pump. Someone needs to try the gadget and feel the carefully designed clicking of the volume wheel. Someone has to get their heart broken in a specific way and someone has to write some kind words for them. Someone has to be disappointed in the customer service and warn others who come after them. None of those people get paid, three decades ago most of them* shared just fine on BBSs and usenet, while paying to do so, not to mention geocities, Tumbler, on whatever, happily paying to share. For a long time, your dialup connection even came with an FTP site you on which you could host static web pages from e.g. FrontPage or any number of Windows and Mac tools. Not to mention LiveJournal and then Blogger, followed by MoveableType and Wordpress... People were happy to pay to share instead of get paid, before ads. You cannot really destroy the economics of sharing that way, it remains too cheap and easy. Unless, you were to, say, invent a giant middleman replacing these yahoos that prioritized "content" that works well to collect and send clicks when ads are wrapped around it, then ensure whatever anyone shares disappears unless they play the game, so more ads can be sold both on the middleman and on the content. At that point, your sharing becomes gamified, and you're soon sharing not to share something important, but for the points.... Oh. > the livelihoods of those who built them But it was never supposed to be about a new class of livelihood. Imagine, if you will, some kind of whole earth catalog hand curated by a bunch of Yahoos... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free --- * Those who had anything useful they felt compelled to share for the good of others, not as scaffolding content for ads to surround. Getting paid to say any of those things tends to be negatively correlated with the quality of what's being said. Those who share just because "you need to know this", there tends to be something to what they put out there. | ||||||||
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