> If content producers are willing to put in the hard work of developing a reputation for quality output slowly, disseminated through trusted sources, surely augmented by some form of paid marketing but not by just spamming the web with links in the hopes that they can get clicks and then use dark patterns to keep people on the site long enough to monetize 20 seconds of their eyeball time, then maybe they can get people to willingly pay them.
What do you think traditional print media organizations were trying to do for decades before they gave up and embraced the new normal with layoffs and consolidation? Substack is an extremely, small, extremely premium part of what used to be the whole.
> Consumers don't want to pay because most content on the web is not worth paying for.
Maybe much content on the web is not worth paying for, but the vast majority consumers don't want to pay regardless of the quality, not because of it. It has literally been impossible for most news organizations to survive because people would rather read the advertising-funded "22 year-old" than a quality outlet where they have to pay any amount of money.
This is a complicated phenomenon and I can't possibly do justice to the complexity in the space of a link aggregation comment. Arguably, the truth of that very statement is part of the problem here. Our attention spans have shortened. When I was 8 and wanted to learn about something, I'd gladly dive into the library and read thousands of pages uninterrupted for hours a day. Now I'm here, skimming thousands of comments to try and figure out which seem interesting enough to make the link itself worth visiting, then possibly actually visiting it or possibly just putting in a tab I later close when I realize I'll never get to it.
Without any sort of gate to publishing, we're all inundated with information overload. So yeah, print media got their lunch eaten for many reasons, including being too slow to pivot to digital delivery at all, but also with the payment model. Outsourcing content curation to Hacker News or the people you follow on Facebook is free. I used to read the LA Times for two hours every single morning when I was in middle school and high school. Do I trust Hacker News more than I trust the LA Times editorial board today? Do I trust the LA Times more but not $6 a month more or whatever they're charging now? I have no idea, but I've changed my information consumption habits anyway.
At least part of the issue is the nature of news itself. Events happen in the world. Someone out there finds out and reports it to others. Eventually, it reaches me. It used to be that people being paid by the LA Times had a level of unique access both to the sources of information and to dissemination channels I could readily access, and that was worth paying for. Today, that no longer seems to be the case. A thousand different people are going to post the same information to a thousand different sources at exactly the same time. Which of those thousands of people deserves to be compensated? If you just split whatever the salary of an LA Times reporter used to be a thousand different ways, that isn't enough to make it into a viable profession.
Maybe information about important events in the world has become a public good in a world with such a low bar to publishing. We can try to invent technical means of preventing access and then charging for it, but it can never possibly be enough to actually cover the costs of all of the different people out there trying to publish, not with micropayments, not with subscriptions, not with anything. Maybe we need to just publicly fund some small number of professionals doing this for a living and anyone else that wants to try can do it without the expectation they'll ever be compensated for it. Expecting high-quality fact-based reporting paid for by consumers may just not be possible any more.
What do you think traditional print media organizations were trying to do for decades before they gave up and embraced the new normal with layoffs and consolidation? Substack is an extremely, small, extremely premium part of what used to be the whole.
> Consumers don't want to pay because most content on the web is not worth paying for.
Maybe much content on the web is not worth paying for, but the vast majority consumers don't want to pay regardless of the quality, not because of it. It has literally been impossible for most news organizations to survive because people would rather read the advertising-funded "22 year-old" than a quality outlet where they have to pay any amount of money.