#paywalls

[altamont498]

Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls

The case for making journalism free—at least during the 2024 election

I swear to God if you wrote something like this into a political satire like Spitting Image, it’d be called too on-the-nose.

[existennialmemes]

Is there a word for like Paywallification? For when the service itself has not gotten worse, but what was initially free has become paywalled.

Because I want to call it enshittification but that's not exactly right. The service is still good and I still want access to it, but the thing that used to be free now wants $50/month. And no. No to that and honestly fuck you for even asking

[simandy]

I think that we as a community should start repelling those people for real. We already know all they do is following trends, ignoring the rest of us, cc tracking, doxing etc. So why do we keep endorsing that shit? Why do we keep paying for it? If they're out there making that amount of money by SELLING cc, it's because there's someone to buy it. I know there are simmers that are out of the community. Mostly kids and teens who have no idea there is an entire community about it. Let the people who don't know about their evildoings raise them, why do we know and still pay for it? PSMBD is out there, dollhouse mafia, kemono party, ts4 rebels, etc etc. They will always have the stuff. And if they don't, is it really worth it? To give money to the kind of person who throws tantrums at a comment section and calls you a freeloader because you want one thing for free? I don't think it is, darling.

[dispatchesfromtheclasswar]

[still-vtoh]

why doesn't @capcut just fucking be pay-to-use at this point If I can't even EXTRACT AUDIO FUCK MY LIFE

[nicoletteolivier]

Through no specific intention of my own, I have now put my wholeass human eyes on two different programs of people solving mysteries at old folks homes, a show and a movie.

But that's not the headline, here.

The issue I take, is that both of these things have featured Springsteen and Bowie music, among others, and I feel like I'm losing my goddamn mind seeing music categorized in this way. Yes, I realize that technically-speaking, this music was from a specific eras, but it feels like it's being intentionally marginalized, used against content of old, retired people, and therefore outdated, or no longer valid.

It's jarring and displacing.

Displaced is every Millennial's middle name, which makes it even more bothersome. We grew up in a very unique time in history where we had massive access to content. Cable tv gave us a huge variety of shows from classic to modern, to things that were intended specifically for us as kids. Many of those channels showed a huge variety of movies, classic, fairly-modern, and modern--constantly. Video stores were on every corner, and in grocery stores, and they were social meeting places. Our parents and every adult we knew had giant record and CD collections, and we had access to all of it. It was also why we were and are so fixated on nostalgia, whole industries popped up to support our media flare habit.

And likely, will be the only generation who experienced that.

We were and are media nomads. Years and eras did not matter, we weren't drawing lines in the sand about what we were supposed to like or not, we liked it all, together. Things our grandparents listened to and watched all the way to whatever was current at the time. Everything was homogeneous, and no one was bothered if something came out in the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, or the 2000s, and we shared it with each other, sometimes competitively. We had the benefit of being able to develop eclectic tastes in tv, movies, and music, and we consumed.

It was the most three-dimensional way of experiencing media, so now living in generation paywall, where everything is hoarded by corporations, partitioned, and obscured by ads, it's extremely difficult to access wide varieties of anything, and creativity will suffer. Education will suffer. Critical thinking will suffer. Experience will suffer. Worldliness and expanded points-of-view will suffer. People don't and won't know they need to go the extra mile to cultivate a bigger and better experience. Another problem living in a dead society to throw on the pyre. Culture will die. It will be marginalized and pushed out of the zeitgeist.

You shouldn't be listening to a few dozen musicians, you should be listening to thousands--internationally. The same with movies and shows. If you've never watched a 60's western, or a silent film, you have to take the extra step to expose yourself to everything outside the algorithm bubble your phone has you trapped inside. Make an effort not to let corporate greed keep you from expanding your horizons. Pirate everything. Keep physical media. Explore. Trade. Rinse, repeat.

[timidsketch]

Wow, news corporations eliminated 12ft.io from the internet this week

[yonahsienna]

This Was Supposed to Be Fun

Or: WTF happened to the online Commons, and where do we go now?

Let me start by saying that I don't want to be a "content creator" or “online influencer”. I don't want to "optimize engagement" or “build an agile social strategy”. I don’t even particularly want to Start a Blog or Podcast. I just want to f#¢&!ng hang out with my friends and community online, and I feel like we should have The Technology to just do that by now.

Of course (infuriatingly) we did have that technology! I first connected to the World Wide Web in 2001 when I was ten years old. Back then, the whole family shared one computer, which I mostly used to play Age of Empires, Bugdom, and Oregon Trail. Connecting to the Internet meant that nobody could use the phone, so we would log on quickly (accompanied by a symphony of discordant whistles and beeps), check emails and/or MSN messages, and then pass the computer to the next person.

As our access to the Internet grew through my teens, so did the diversity of content we consumed, shared, and bonded over. eBaum’s World and Newgrounds hosted a plethora of simple, free webgames we'd play once we got bored with the handful my parents were willing to buy, as well as the first viral videos like Numa Numa and Star Wars Kid. We also connected in new ways with a growing “social web” — profiles on sites like Myspace and Livejournal and eventually the early Facebook were a way that anyone could have their own site on the web, a little virtual locker that you could decorate and fill up to your liking, and have your friends stuff with virtual notes.

In my late teens and early twenties, the Internet was mostly for research and keeping up with student government and clubs via long weekly emails stuffed with hyperlinks and attachments. It wasn't until I was well into my twenties that I got my first smartphone. At university, the only way to connect to the Internet “on the go” was to tweet my on-the-go thoughts by sending an SMS text message to Twitter at 21212. I also hardly used the social web anyways, other than for a quick dopamine distraction or break from long study sessions in the library. I had even deleted my Facebook account that I'd had since high school, since the campus coffee shop and bar served as more than enough of a hub for socializing, philosophical and political debates, and important announcements posted on cork boards or delivered by intercom.

I know I probably sound like a stereotypical Millennial, whining about the “good ole days”, but I wanted to spend this time on memory lane for a reason. I think that no matter when you grew up, this feeling is probably close to universal: from the early 2000s to early 2020s, the Internet and social web seemed to just work. There were a lot of things wrong with the world, but the Internet was where we went to complain about other problems, not a source of them. But of course, even back then we were living on borrowed money and time. The virtual Commons we had grown comfortable in never actually belonged to us, the users. From the moment they incorporated, the big sites belonged to venture capital, who sold them out to the oligarchs, who sold them out to the fascists. We were never the customer, always the product.

Flash forward to 2025. The “big four” North American social media outlets (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok) have all been captured by the Trump administration. Smaller sites, like Reddit, Telegram, and Substack have long been a hotbed for bigotry and hate speech. Searches on Apple, Google, Microsoft, and even Pinterest are serving up LLM “AI” slop before authentic and unique human creations. Ads, suggestions, sponsored posts, and cookie pop-ups take up far more space than the content I came for. And if I ever want my family, friends, and community to actually see my updates, I either need to send them to each person directly, or market my posts not to them, but to an algorithm optimized not for users or even businesses, but shareholder profit. On top of all of this, there is a pervasive sense of how uncomfortably public, permanent, and surveilled it all is. (In parallel to all this: efforts to gather in person are cut at the knees by a lack of coherent and safe public health policies, the dismantling of Third Spaces and affordable public transportation, and the militarization of the police.)

It is horrifying that exactly when the biggest thing we need for survival is to build and strengthen community, that the only accessible tools to do so, are hostile to our very existence.

Obviously this isn’t a coincidence. Every time we, the people, can talk to each other directly, we start getting dangerous ideas about the fact that the ultra-wealthy and hyper-elite are so few, and the rest of us are so many. Pamphlets facilitated the French and American revolutions, the telegraph and radio hastened the collapse of the Russian and German Empires, and Twitter fanned the flames of the Arab Spring. And here in America, The Powers That Be, Red and Blue alike, overwhelmingly want the American government in strict control over where and how we can communicate with each other.

And here I am, just hoping for a single F#¢&!NG site on the whole World Wide Web where I can just hang out with family, friends, and community that isn't owned and operated by literal fascists, kept behind a paywall, or too technical for our Elders to use. A comfy virtual coffee shop with announcement boards, conversations, the occasional performance, and a locker nearby for collecting memories and passing notes.

I don’t really know what the Takeaway/Call to Action is here. Yes, I’m already on Tumblr, Mastadon, and Bluesky, and would love it if we all continued to grow these kind of alternatives while divesting from profit-driven social "platforms". I’m still on Discord, Snapchat, and Signal and even have accounts on Loops, Pixelfed, and Xiaohongshu, in case the center of gravity ever moves over to those places. All of them still feel very "under construction" though, so I don't even know which (if any) I feel comfortable asking friends and family to "switch over" to. In the meantime, I'm just feeling lost, sad, lonely, and adrift; and wanted to share these musings with y’all. Just in case anyone has any advice you want to share, or are feeling the same way and want to commiserate.

xposted to Facebook, Tumblr, Medium, and WriteAs. God, I hate the Internet right now >:(