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Not all quality content can be produced in spare time as a labour of love. High quality journalism, for example.

I seriously doubt ads could support production of that content either.

They're not - and that's one of the big problems facing our civic society. It's just not economically possible to write level-headed content at any real scale.

> The internet was built on people writing massive forums posts about completely stripping down Kawasaki motorbike engines...

Yes the internet came about because of academics and hobbyists playing around in their spare time. We as people who often came up during that time have a habit of over-weighting that. The internet is not a side project anymore. The internet is the future of every industry - and absolutely the future of every content creation industry.

You can't expect every industry to be reduced to what can be produced by hobbyists working for free in their spare time.

>You can't expect every industry to be reduced to what can be produced by hobbyists working for free in their spare time.

You're implying that it's in some fashion my job to care about those industries.

I don't care what happens to buzzfeed, and I don't care what happens to the wallstreet journal. /My life/ and /my needs/ and met regardless of their existence, so I really don't give a shit whether they are sustainable or not.

Do you care what happens to your newspaper? Because it's not the Buzzfeeds of the world who are suffering because people like you feel entitled to free content. It's the publishers who can actually hold our institutions and leaders to account.

>Do you care what happens to your newspaper?

Not really, they're owned by long serving members of one of the major parties. Their impartiality is directly proportional to the time until the next Icelandic election.

>People essentially enjoy creating and sharing, and love putting up quality content about things they truly give a shit about.

I don't believe that applies to even a tiny fraction of people. I work with a LOT of world-class scientists (biotech). I can tell you outright that after they leave work, the LAST thing they want to do is to spend hours updating Wikipedia or arguing in forum posts about scientific minutia. (Yes, it might be different in pure academia, where people love to publish, but even there, they're already getting compensated)

So even if we take your argument ast face value, people who enjoy sharing _ALSO_ enjoy getting paid. To take a relevant example, the primary reason Linux didn't fail (like most hobby projects do) was because companies pumped in hundreds of millions of dollars to pay people to actually write code. You want to write a AAA game, a web browser, a compiler, an OS or any other software tool that has hundreds of millions of lines of code and can compete with the leading products, while not spending a dime? Good luck and god speed is what I'd say. So while in principle, I might agree with your proposition that one man MAY give away the fruits of their labor, and that those fruits might be very very delicious, the world is running out of things people can do in their spare time for free that is also worth looking at. Please note that I'm not talking about hacking out a tiny tool over the weekend. I'm talking about sustained efforts to produce something of value.

> The world came to the internet for the content that people made for free, because it was the best.

You need to provide a _LOT_ of evidence if you want people to believe such an outlandish claim.

> The internet was built on people writing massive forums posts about completely stripping down Kawasaki motorbike engines

You're skipping the birth of the internet and are talking about the teenage years. I was alive and on the internet in the very early 90s. Academics and Hobbyists created the barebones of the internet, sure, sorta. But the internet didn't explode in popularity until people started making money off it. That's when the 90s internet bubble started to form. Even before the internet, services like Prodigy, Compuserve and AOL were here, quite literally being the internet. There were local BBSs and then there were big, national BBSs like Prodigy and Compuserve. They were little internets onto themselves, and produced content themselves. At the time, they were more popular than the web itself, because the content today simply didn't exist like it did back then. No google, No wikipedia, forums were still in their infancy, etc.

> I totally and utterly refute your statement. The world came to the internet for the content that people made for free

Wrong. You most certainly weren't on the internet back then if you're going to stand behind that statement because it's 100% false. It's simply too complex for that statement to hold true. Everything from internet speeds to cheap computers played a much larger part -- the internet sucked back in the mid 90s because it took 3 minutes to load up a simple (non animated) gif file. Videos? Hah! It would take you a week to download a 15 minute clip. Due to these issues, people got fed up or were impatient and it delayed adoption.

> Quality online content will not vanish if online advertising fails, because quality online content is posted by people who first and foremost /want to post content/.

That's great in some naive ideological fantasy, but it ignores a little something called human nature, more specifically, greed and/or the need to put food on the table. People will want to make money off their work and people will create content for money. Just because some people will create content for free doesn't mean they constitute a majority, or even a minority.

> Wrong. You most certainly weren't on the internet back then if you're going to stand behind that statement because it's 100% false.

I was on the Internet back them and I certainly came for the freely published content... So it's not 100% false.

"It's totally not. People essentially enjoy creating and sharing, and love putting up quality content about things they truly give a shit about."

As someone who participated in, and helped build, this early vision of the Internet, I am very, very sympathetic to (and enthusiastic about) your statement and vision.

However, you can't look at something amazing like this:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/26/us/turkey-pro...

... and think that this, or some useful version of this, would come out of the amateur, self-published, enthusiast ether.

I am floored by what they've done here and how they have used static text and interactivity and video motion to present a story. This is amazing work and someone has to pay the bills for this.

I don't know how that happens but I know it's not happening for free.

So who pays for the servers?

Enthusiastic individuals. I personally have content which I host on Digital Ocean droplets and which do not generate any kind of revenue for me.

And who pays for the investigative reports?

Who pays for the academics who spend their lifetimes researching the field we're reading about?

Who pays salaries so the best people can make a living doing what they're truly great at?

Who makes enough money to get big and old enough to gain a reputation? Without which, the news is a hail of unsubstantiated bulletins from semianonymous writers, a wilderness of mirrors and fake news amped up to eleven?

Believing that we can make content totally free is utopian. You might as well ask why to bother paying software engineers large salaries when open source software exists.

In a world where content is free, all that happens is that newspapers become the organs of plutocrats and political groups. If you want to imagine how the internet looks when content is totally free, imagine a Facebook news feed written by the Koch brothers.

I'm sure Putin will be very happy to subsidize lots of reporting for Americans coming from Russia Today! There all the content you want! It might not be good for our democracy, but that may not have been included in the problem statement. :-)

Honestly, it's not the Russian propagandists I'm worried about. It's the American ones.

Oh, come on man, the academics should would for kudos. /s

Academics are paid with tax dollars.

Assuming this is serious: actually, no. Academics are ultimately paid by a mix of university tuition fees (paid by students) and research grants (which may come from tax-funded entities, but more generally come from charities and philanthropic orgs).

We don't live in the same country FYI.

But then it's not free. It's just that somebody else is paying for it. And that quickly becomes hard, when your readership grows. Especially if you are just starting out. Even Wikipedia was at first sponsored by a private, for-profit organisation.

Same people who currently pay for Bittorrent's servers, I imagine.