The good old "there can not be free-of-cost content unless money is involved" fallacy.
I am a member of many communities whose hosting costs are paid by the communities, the administrative tasks are shared by members of the communities, I "consume" many sites which only exist because their authors want to express themselves, I use sites that exist because people feel the need to share their knowledge and collections of bytes. They all exist without a single ad. They exist because someone wants them to exist.
This comment was written and shared for free on the web without restrictions because I felt the urge to write it.
It seems like you just cherry picked a few small sites and claim that if they can do it, everyone can.
Sure hosting costs are ridiculous cheap and now anyone can publish for next to nothing. But do you get all your content from your friends posts on Facebook? There's a reason why real original and valuable content requires dedicated staff to do it and that does cost money.
You don't look at movies and think "well that could just be done for free if they really cared about it" so why attribute that to good content that just happens to be in another medium?
Not all news and content creation can be done as a side job or hobby. The people who do journalism, create content, or support that goal of quality journalism need to make a living somehow.
It's entirely plausible that those things are not profitable enterprises any more. A user doesn't have to surrender his/her privacy to prop up a dying industry.
It's possible that journalism becomes supported by patronage the way art once was.
Absolutely. And I wholeheartedly think that enough people support high quality journalism. See the 1 million online subscribers to the NY Times.
The majority of online journalism seems to be regurgitated news agency reports and stuff that no one needs (or can get free from communities elsewhere).
lots of forums, blogs and aggregators perfected clickbait and cat picture distributions a decade ago.
You picked a particularly terrible example, since the Times hasn't stopped struggling since introducing an online subscription, and most depressingly, is starting to experiment with the same clickbait bullshit that Buzzfeed popularized (things like increasingly questionably labeled "sponsored stories").
I am a member of many communities whose hosting costs are paid by the communities, the administrative tasks are shared by members of the communities, I "consume" many sites which only exist because their authors want to express themselves, I use sites that exist because people feel the need to share their knowledge and collections of bytes. They all exist without a single ad. They exist because someone wants them to exist.
This comment was written and shared for free on the web without restrictions because I felt the urge to write it.