
Online Cesspool Got You Down? You Can Clean It Up, for a Price - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/13/magazine/internet-premium.html
======
dredmorbius
This piece reminds me strongly of a particularly pathetic 2005 item, also in
the _Times_ , "Corrupted PC's Find New Home in the Dumpster", the upshot of
which was to the effect that if you were rich and ignorant, physically dumping
a PC into the rubbish bin to fix software and configuration problems was a
logical, effective, and sensible response. It's not.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/technology/17spy.html?page...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/technology/17spy.html?pagewanted=print)

Yes, there are services which will promise the skies in delivering an ad-free
or curated experience. In some small and narrow niches, this may succeed. In
large part, these services will fail, with numerous results.

One is that the promise of ad-free paid subscriptions will give way to
advertising-included pay services. See the long history of cable and premium
television channels.

Or that a subscription-based service will simply prove unsustainable. If it's
merely a publication, you'll find it folding. If it's a community, you'll find
your community and relevant connections and activities (social, professional,
intellectual, commercial) terminated, often with little or no notice, and
grossly insufficient migration options. "Saving your own data" fails to
accomplish the frequently desired goal of "preserving your community".

If it's a hardware-integrated service, you find yourself with both a
terminated service _and_ a closet- or garage-full of newly-useless kit.

If it's a hosted media access platform -- DRM-infested texts, video, or audio
-- you'll find yourself cut off from access to content _you have bought and
paid for._ This is _starting_ to be addressed in some small parts, but remains
largely intractable for many.

The biggest flaw in this article, really a classic "submarine" in the Paul
Graham sense, is that it presumes that the only solution, or even a _viable_
solution, to a market problem is to market-it-harder.

When broadcast technologies first emerged -- radio in the 1930s and later
television in the 1950s, there was a large, and largely forgotten, very public
debate over whether a private-ownership or public-provisioning model was
appropriate.

In the US, the private approach was undertaken, and ABC, CBS, and NBC, among
numerous other networks, now almost wholly consolidated, were born. In Europe,
notably Britain, this was seen as a tremendous risk, opening the door to
corporate and foreign interference in public discourse, information, and
opinion (a fear which may have been well warranted), and instead a tax-
supported Broadcast Service was created.

Each side relaxed somewhat. Public broadcasting didn't entirely vanish in the
United States, and several independent stations joined forces in the 1960s.
PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service (television) was formed in 1969, its
radio sibling, NPR, National Public Radio, in 1971. C-SPAN, a paid-
subscription, but public-service network, was created for cable by Brian Lamb
in 1979. Its funding comes as a part of baseline cable subscriber fees.

There are other models in the online world.

Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites support general informational content,
including encyclopedias, dictionaries, books, news, data, educational content,
and more, on a donor-supported basis:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation)

Several years ago when looking at detectable measures of signal/noise ratios
for various online services, publications, and domains, I found that the
venerable Metafilter ranked exceptionally high. Though small (scale of any
limited-access platform will be hugely reduced), the presence of intellectual
rather than pop-cultural references, as determined by Google results counts
for the _Foreign Policy_ Top 100 Global Thinkers names as against the
arbitrarily selected string "Kim Kardashian" was the highest of any social
media site tested (FB, Twitter, G+, and others), indicated as the FP:KK ratio.
Blogs, exemplfied by Wordpress domains, also did surprisingly well. See:
[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/)

Metafilter's trick? A one-time $5 fee payed per account, forfeited in the
event of abuse.

More generally, the problem of paid-vs-free, or even multi-tiered public-
service provisioning, is that _unless the quality of the free or low-cost
service is abysmally poor, few will avail themselves of the higher-cost
levels._

I'd first encountered that observation in the context of multi-class rail-
service provisioning by French polymath Jules Dupuit. Upshot: the reason
third-class accomodations are so miserable isn't that it would cost to much to
improve them, but that improving them would cannibalise higher-class service
levels. Those who've flown coach class in recent years can likely understand.

See: [https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/why-does-air-travel-
suck-...](https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/why-does-air-travel-suck-so-bad-
this-19th-century-economist-explained-it-with-ju.html)

Tim Harford's addressed this in the specific context of digital media services
at FT:

[http://archive.is/fHB9D](http://archive.is/fHB9D)

Applied to information services, a similar inevitable logic is self-evident.

Put another way, there's a tremendous deadweight loss to any such proposal.
Marketing-it-harder will deny access to all but the wealthiest members of the
public. Though as a market-segmentation technique for identifying high-spend-
propensity individuals, this is ambrosia for advertisers, hence the inevitable
encroachment of advertising to such services.

