Welcome to the Age of Paid Social Media
Welcome to the Age of Paid Social Media
The saying goes if you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Now, you’re both. Every big social media app is testing subscriptions. It's a business model that comes with a perverse incentive. Just like airlines, if you make life worse, more people will pay.
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Well, Fediverse it is. When thousand people pay for thousand servers, it's better for everyone - no ads and no fees and the ones hosting the content don't need the money to survive. Some people will voluntarily donate to you, most will not, but in the end everyone is happy.
It works for Wikipedia, which is probably the single most important site on the Internet.
It also works for podcasts, well enough to produce an enormous amount of high-quality content, both from independent productions and networks.
I just wish that Wikipedia didn't donate the money that people donated to it to other charities.
They recently donated a million dollars of their donations to other charitable causes and in theory I'm fine with that but in practice I feel like sort of tricked or betrayed and I just don't like it.
I refuse to ever donate to them again until they swear to never ever do that again.
Wikipedia also has to regularly beg for donations and is probably something of an outlier.
Pretty much every podcast I've ever heard has sponsors and built-in ads, or at least shout-outs.
I do think Patreon-style funding is a really good model, but ultimately, most people will not pay for a thing if they can get it for free and tell themselves that other people will pay for it instead. Exceptions to that exist, but they're rare.