Mildly Infuriating

Yes officer, I’d like to charge this phone with battery.

I doubt they can read this. Rip ops phone

Journalism is a public good and should be publicly funded.

Very few newspapers survived the transition to digital because suddenly nobody wanted to pay for access to something they could get online for free.

This has nothing to do with click bait low quality ad driven news.

The cut off of access to information is a fundamental problem of using capitalism to allocate resources in an information economy. Information does not behave the same as matter and energy, it is a fundamentally different physical property of the universe, and unlike matter and energy, it is not conserved and limited in the same way.

With matter and energy, to replicate it, you need the same amount of resources as the original, if you possess the original, I cannot possess it, and to make a copy I need all the metal /energy that you did to make the first one. But with information, once it exists in a digital format, we can effectively replicate it infinitely and immediately to everyone around the globe, for next to nothing. At a fundamental level, information does not have the same property of scarcity as literally all physical goods. Information is fundamentally different at the physics level, then matter and energy.

And that's a problem now that we're trying to use capitalism to fund an information economy. Capitalism is entirely based on the idea of scarce things being valuable; despite everyone needing oxygen / air to live, it is not valuable in most places because it is not scarce.

So what has happened? Did we act intelligently and back up and examine whether capitalism is the right system of resource allocation for the information economy where information has the ability to flow freely to everyone? No. We had fistedly spend billions and billions of dollars and wasted millions of people's lives building the copyright system, and the patent system, and paywalls and DRM, all in the pursuit of creating artificial scarcity where there was never a need for it.

Journalism should be accessible to everyone. Not many people can afford 30 different subscriptions for every individual news outlet because they're all pay to read. Remember newspapers? Anyone could buy one on the cheap, now these fuckers have moved to a subscription service that's even more expensive than the average newspaper used to be.

I do pay for my local paper, cable, spotify, disney+, Netflix...

Only so much blood in this here stone.

No, not everybody hates ads. Everybody hates today's ads, because they're literally as intrusive and annoying as the designers can make them. I didn't have a problem with ads 15 years ago, but because I have to pay for my bandwidth, and because ads like to literally block what I'm reading with a giant, 100MB, unskippable video, I use an ad blocker.

Advertising shot itself in the foot, and it isn't our fault for being pushed so far that we're fed up with it.

Some sites (Fandom Wikis) are unbearable with ads. Sure, you could pay to remove them, but only because it’s so infuriating to navigate the content when it has multiple ads—some that follow you—INSIDE the content of the articles.

Autoplaying videos, side banners, and scrolling ads are the worst and actively make me want to avoid the sites unless adblock is on.

How do you feel about government subsidies being used to bolster a free press? From past examples like oil, they don't become a shell company of the governments whims and I feel journalism is just as important to an educated populace in comparison to oil for our commerce.

You can't have actually free and truthful news as long as people need money to survive

How long before this goes the way of 12ft.io