Congratulations, my friends, you slew the ogre!
I’m referring, of course, to the “old media” – the conglomerates of reporting and distribution that served as a gate-keeper to the public awareness – the monopolistic controllers of public punditry that brought us Cronkite, and Rather, and endless CIA-promoted talking points in the New York Times. It didn’t die in a glorious battle, though, it died by being suffocated with a plastic bag over its head. And, unfortunately, you’re in the process of slowly discovering that you suffocated yourselves, too, in the process.
The old media had a comfortable relationship with the advertising industry – which paid lots of money and it ran their important messages in tasteful, easily ignored, corners of its work. We consumers could predict that the ads on the TV shows would come every 1/2 hour at the top and bottom of the dial, until it became every 15 minutes. We could predict that there would be ads wedged between the columns of the newspaper, where our eyes could seamlessly flick past them. And, because this was not too annoying, and was manageable, the consumers of media put up with it, mostly, and subscribed sometimes. Sure, there were complaints and threats of regulation when a product placement in a movie was just a little bit too obvious, or whatever, but the landscape of media crap was in a fairly stable homeostasis – enough so that we were willing to subscribe to the newspapers, magazines, go to the movies, or watch “free” television with its built-in snack and bathroom breaks. The old media sucked, sure, but it was a regulated, genteel, sort of suck.
Then, the new media came along and pulled off what has to be one of the greatest feats of indirection of all time: you collectively said “it’s free!” and forced the old media, which charged money, to compete against free. Who would pay to have ink-covered dead trees delivered to their door when they can click over to a free website where there’s virtually unlimited quantities of, well, stuff produced on the cheap, often, in order to tease consumer eyeballs away. It wasn’t obviously predatory because the new media preyed on itself as much as it did on the old media, but what it did was suck all the oxygen out of the subscription-based media model, rendering the old media unsustainable and bankrupting it. We consumers cheerfully played along with this, because we didn’t really love the old media that much to begin with and besides, the new media was free and it just seems impossibly stupid to expect your consumers to pay for something over here that they can get for free over there with the same amount of effort. That’s what I mean about suffocating the media giant by putting a plastic bag over its head and watching it slowly expire: the value proposition of a subscriber-base is that there are a lot of people giving a little money, and it all adds up. Or, should I say, it “ads” up? Because the new media, in order to provide its goods for free had to make the same devil’s bargain with advertisers that the old media did.
I don’t use the expression “devil’s bargain” lightly, because the new media stumbled around with the advertising industry and managed to produce a new advertising metastasis that is substantially worse. Now, if you look on youtube (for example) the content is interrupted with ads that are completely unregulated – they pop up wherever, whenever, and sometimes they’re stupid, badly-produced crap that drones on (in violation of the advertisement policy) or tries to link the viewer to someplace that’s a gigantic, seething, sea of crap. Youtube, since it’s an important content aggregator, has some control over its advertisers (for now!) but small sites that tried to fund their free content were increasingly pushed into a corner where they had to advertise with random marketing robots that would pop up political ads, porn site ads, or whatever. As an aside, the new media/old media battle has played itself out in the porn world as well – I don’t think that there is anyone who still pays for porn, unless they are paying to make the obnoxious ads go away, and that’s a discounted payment to the aggregator platform – which has placed a plastic bag over its head, too, because it has created a consumer community who expect the content to be free, or they’ll go somewhere where it is.
Meanwhile, new media has responded by trying to convince its “content providers” to work for free, so it can pass the savings on to the consumer. I’m just kidding, they pocket the difference. But, there were countless free news media that sprung up, and gutted the old media news sources by giving away their content – in return telling their writers “someday, when we figure out how to make money doing this, we’ll give you some – but in the meantime, this is going to look great on your resume!” In other words, when you’re still unemployed, your resume will stack up more or less favorably against the resume of the unemployed old media journalists whose jobs you suffocated to death with your free content and your listicles. Didn’t see that coming, did you? You should have. Now, even huge content aggregators like Youtube, which used to make some of its content providers quite wealthy, have been pushing the monetization problem down the stack to the content providers: post your stuff here for free, and have a Patreon or an onlyfans or a substack and you can be your own boss, meanwhile we’ll pocket the advertising revenue and we control the algorithms that decide who sees what and, therefore, who gets advertising revenue at all. Then, the content providers have to crap up their content by embedding another layer of marketing or product placements in their material, where it’s competing with the platform’s own marketing and product placements and it’s a race to the bottom to see how fast everything turns to crap. Meanwhile, I have to cringe as I hear a formerly respectable podcaster like, say, Malcolm Gladwell, touting stupid products instead of telling me interesting things for free. Do you want to know the price of Malcolm Gladwell’s soul? It’s free. All of these media are about to completely put the plastic bag over their heads and realize that they can’t make ends meet by giving their content away, either, and they’re in exactly the same corner that they painted the old media into a couple decades ago.
Nope
I’m not crying for The Washington Post or any of the old media, but I’m not going to cry for the new media, either. In fact, I’ve had a couple of good laughs when I read about how some new media like Buzzfeed are thinking of switching to AIs like ChatGPT to write listicles automatically and they imagine that will hold the consumers’ interest long enough for an ad-marketing company to pay them a few fractions of a penny for the clicks? The bottom of the feeds are already jamming with AI or meat robot-generated content like, “Aging star ${whoever} walks dog in Manhattan wearing next to nothing!” I have even, I swear, seen a few clickbaits claiming that some aging rock musician has died – and I fell for it, once, I admit. At the rate the ad market evolves, that revenue channel has already died and dried up. You idiots have done this to yourselves, and nobody’ll miss you for a second. In a decade or less people will be talking about Facebook the same way they talk about Myspace and Second Life: it was a cool idea for its time, which was about 200 nanoseconds – decades ago. Do you remember what happened to Myspace? Same thing: it was free until it made the devil’s bargain and started getting jammed with ads and garbage to pursue platform monetization and … everybody went someplace else.
Anyhow, I just wanted to say “enjoy the ride.” It’s just going to get rockier from here, especially if more people catch on and start installing adblockers in their browsers. I get stopped by paywalls, now, from dying websites that moan, “we make our living off of ads, please disable your adblocker if you want to see the article you clicked on.” Nope (click) never mind. As long as the stuff is free and the ads aren’t too onerous, I’ll keep consuming your product, but scrabbling after those ad-click revenues – that’s your scramble, not mine. And the AIs are just around the corner, about to start competing with you in that scrabbling contest, which you will lose. But maybe “journalist” will look good on your resume.
One thing remains true: content is king. I’ll pay for good content, but only if I haven’t been conditioned to expect it for free, and suddenly now you want how much? Or you’re going to lay off your “journalists” and guilt-trip me into paying their salary because you have such a lame badly thought-out business model that you already can’t make a living doing what you’re doing? That’s not my problem (click) never mind. Suddenly the old public media annual beg-a-thons (remember those?) are going to start to look good to you.
I’m not going to end this with some sage advice for you, how to get out of the corner you’ve painted yourself into, and you have as much claim on my pity as The Washington Post did. The reason I’m writing this is, I suppose, to explain why it is that you’ll find your beg-a-thons don’t work and nobody wants to subscribe to your “buy this magazine or we’ll shoot this dog” genius marketing. Enjoy the scorched, blasted, wasteland you helped create. Really. There’s some lovely filth over here.
First, nice ref to Nat Lamp. I am particularly partial to the cover which had a quote from W R Hearst, “Show me a magazine with a pretty girl, a dog, or a baby on it, and I’ll show you a magazine that sells” (picture of a baby sitting at a kitchen table while a young woman is offering him a serving platter which features a golden retriever with an apple in its mouth).
Second, isn’t this an indictment against our current rabid form of capitalism, where we do not recognize the value of anything but place a price tag on everything? There are places where you can get great content for free, but that’s only because the people involved are not following the capitalist model, and instead follow something else. I recall the shareware/freeware movement in the 1980s, the ethos of which could be boiled down to “Everybody do whatever you think is cool and useful, because somebody else will think it’s cool and useful. We’ll all share it, and everyone will be better off”. The current OER (Open Educational Resource) movement is the child of that kind of thinking. I was/am involved in both, but I was only able to do so because I had a regular job to pay the bills.
As a friend of mine likes to point out, the practical side of this situation is that sites that tend to have high quality content are behind paywalls, while the crap is always free. It’s an automatic dumbing down of the people.
Future historians may refer to our society as “Those who ate their seed corn”.
If you haven’t already, google “Cory Doctorow enshittification”. He’s written some good stuff about how the business models evolve to become, well, enshittified.
I think this also relates to the level of competition. There’s just so much content that no human being could ever view a fraction of it, so why should I spend my precious seconds watching an ad?
I’ll simply click on to the next thing. After all, there are state-of-the-art algorithms just dying to suggest me something else to watch. I don’t even have to think about it.
What I’d like to see is a really good micro-payment system… There are paywalled places that regularly produce content I’d like to read, but not enough to justify a full subscription – but if there were some option to pay a few pence per article, I’d be happy to.
Now, I know this link is over 14 years old and therefore practically out of the ark, but I didn’t think anyone paid for porn in 2009, let alone paid for porn and then claimed it on expenses of their spouse, who was at the time the third highest ranking person in the UK government. People are fucking stupid.
Literally in the last month or so Facebook has gone, literally overnight, from being somewhere that shows me 20 posts by my friends and one ad sprinkled in, to being a place that shows me 20 listicles related to things I actively am not interested in (e.g. performance cars) and maybe, if I’m lucking, one post from one of my friends. I’ve tried clicking “Don’t want to see content like this” but it’s like a hydra – two more pop up where there was one before. Overnight, Facebook appears to be trying to actively drive me away. I have no idea why this happened. It’s a shame, because it used to be actually useful, but their greed is definitely going to force me to find something else.
Also, just this week, Youtube Vanced stopped working, so I had to spend 60 seconds finding another app that would remove the shit from Youtube videos. Fuck ads.
Link I meant to put in previous post: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/mar/29/jacqui-smith-expenses-film
Guy Debord seems more and more prescient these days.
Choice is the thing. There are enough things on YouTube for me to pay for premium and get rid of all the Google ads. Some of the creators I follow are now doing in content ads and they are easy enough to skip thru. One of my favorite site’s has turned the in content ads into an art form and has sponsor’s willing to support mini theatrics such as:
Please go to the 8 minute mark on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sZFcVw7ei4
Watch the whole thing if you enjoy wooden boats. The whole project is supported by YT, Patreon, etc.
I’ve paid for porn. It’s a deliberate choice to support small independent artists so they aren’t as vulnerable to being consumed by capitalists
Kinda like donating to Free Thought Blogs, but with more girldick
sonofrojblake@#5:
Literally in the last month or so Facebook has gone, literally overnight, from being somewhere that shows me 20 posts by my friends and one ad sprinkled in, to being a place that shows me 20 listicles related to things I actively am not interested in (e.g. performance cars) and maybe, if I’m lucking, one post from one of my friends. I’ve tried clicking “Don’t want to see content like this” but it’s like a hydra – two more pop up where there was one before. Overnight, Facebook appears to be trying to actively drive me away. I have no idea why this happened. It’s a shame, because it used to be actually useful, but their greed is definitely going to force me to find something else.
Same here, except regarding Instagram instead of Facebook. I used to enjoy being able to see what the various metal artists I enjoy have been up to, then suddenly my feed was full of “influencers” leaning against rented or borrowed lamborghinis, or walking through the lobbies of expensive hotels, etc. I’m sure those are all paid promotions – the idea being to become an “influencer” then get rich promoting makeup or whatever, and finally cash out with an onlyfans page or whatever. The problem on Instagram is that if you watch more than 15% or something of a given offering, it queues up more. That results in a catastrophic feedback loop. I want artists, but instead I get influencers and as a result I go somewhere else.
It appears that even if you interact (“engage” as they call it) with a posting to say you don’t like it – that counts. Obviously, leaving a snarky comment is also engagement. It appears to me that blocking one stream in a category is treated as engagement with the category (“oh this guy hates Fred’s Lamborghini channel, maybe he’ll like Fred’s best friend Bob’s Lamborghini channel”) Meanwhile, I am screaming in frustration at the vast cascade of shallowness that is pouring down on me.
I used to follow a few internet blacksmiths and some scientists on youtube, but youtube never seems to offer up their material, anymore – it’s too busy trying to tease my eyeballs over to similar sponsored content. And, of course, the original content providers are getting shoved aside in the torrent of other people who are basically copying the original people’s schtick. Unfortunately, some of the older content providers have had to respond by adopting the methods that abuse them, since those are short-term successful. If I see one more “yoga teacher does woodwork with a table-saw wearing a bikini” video come up in my feed, I’ll scream. Because screaming is all you can do – if you downvote it or tell it to stop feeding you that kind of stuff – you’ve just asked for more.
The other piece that annoys me about the “great enshitment” is the thumbnails with the goofy expressions. That appears to be a newish thing. Some influencer/marketing consultant/asshole seems to have convinced everyone that high emotion expressions are more eye-catching. That, or boobs.
e.g:
Dr Becky is an astrophysicist, but she’s gotta wear the dumb bimbo expression to attract the clicks, apparently. I still follow her, because she’s awesome, but it makes me a little bit sad to see someone having to embrace the antiintellectualism of the platform.
I tried TikTok but it’s worse. It just seems to be attempts to snag eyeballs (“look, I can shake my butt to viking music!”) and drive them to patreon or onlyfans or substack.
That’s a lot of the background motivation behind this posting. That and the swan-dive Daily Kos appears to be doing. “Let’s replace our newsroom with a Reuters feed, and community provided articles, i.e.: random conspiracy theorists”
UnknownEric the Apostate@#7:
Guy Debord seems more and more prescient these days.
Yup!
I suppose it was obvious that marketing was eventually going to optimize itself, in a darwinian process, until it became like Monty Python’s lethal joke.
dangerousbeans@#9:
I’ve paid for porn. It’s a deliberate choice to support small independent artists so they aren’t as vulnerable to being consumed by capitalists
True, if you have a particular artist or art-form you want to protect against the capitalists, you have to fund them – thereby playing right into the overall game. Tails I win, heads you lose.
jimf@#1:
Second, isn’t this an indictment against our current rabid form of capitalism, where we do not recognize the value of anything but place a price tag on everything? There are places where you can get great content for free, but that’s only because the people involved are not following the capitalist model, and instead follow something else.
/me cheers loudly!
Yes! It’s an indictment of capitalism, and your description that it values nothing because it prices everything is spot on.
A few years ago, before I retired out of the entrepreneur business, I started outlining a book on non-capitalist business models. My underlying premise (I still think it’s right) is that capitalism acts as a percentage drag on a business’ ability to be successful – after all, the capitalists have to make their money and that means taking it from the business and by extension the workers. The project obviously went nowhere because I felt that if I was going to write such a book, I ought to first start some successful non-capitalist businesses but, in case you’ve never done it, running a start-up is a complete committment of time and effort and basically amounts to near-suicide. In fact it was my thinking around that topic that got me into reading Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth and I think I threw up in my own mouth so hard it incapacitated me.
ahcuah@#2:
If you haven’t already, google “Cory Doctorow enshittification”.
I am pretty sure I have, and that’s where “the great enshitment” stuck in my mind.
My memory has been failing badly in the last 2 years, and it’s hard for me to remember what I had for dinner last night, let alone what I read last year. Which, sucks.
I guess this old fart is fortunate that he never got sucked into any of that “social media” stuff.
@billseymour
What do you think this is?
This is antisocial media. This is Sparta!
Marcus @#12
nah, we need to support other people doing things we like
Capitalists are trying to get a cut of that, patreon ect, but even if capitalism disappeared supporting artists you like would still help them create more art