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This has nothing to do with assuming that anyone is automatically owed compensation, regardless of the value of what is produced.

As I said before: Lots of previously successful, legitimate businesses are finding their income slashed. People doing things that are actually valued by others, where the site gets substantial traffic and ads previously paid for staff. This is not an argument that anyone who slaps something on the web deserves compensation. It is an argument that THIS model is failing when it once worked, so we need a new model to pay for the things we do value online. The expectation that all web content be provided for free is not a healthy or realistic expectation. And if this model fails and no other emerges, then either people work for free, whatever terminology you want to use for that, or things we value simply disappear, something I have already seen more than enough of over the years -- and compared to many here, I got online relatively recently.




> Lots of previously successful, legitimate businesses are finding their income slashed.

This is true, but I posit that those businesses can easily move to a pay model. If they can't, they aren't legitimate businesses.

> It is an argument that THIS model is failing when it once worked, so we need a new model to pay for the things we do value online.

"Worked" is not what I would say about the current state of ads on the internet. It certainly doesn't work for me.

> And if this model fails and no other emerges, then either people work for free, whatever terminology you want to use for that,

Volunteering? Play? Definitely not slavery. If you don't want to labor for free, just don't do it. This isn't a complicated situation, you're smart enough to figure this out.

> or things we value simply disappear, something I have already seen more than enough of over the years -- and compared to many here, I got online relatively recently.

Well, I was on the internet in the 90s, and there was some great content back then. I'll actually posit that the signal-to-noise ratio was much higher then.

Also, funded content disappears all the time. If that's the effect you're concerned about, this isn't the cause you're looking for.


> Lots of previously successful, legitimate businesses are finding their income slashed.

This is true, but I posit that those businesses can easily move to a pay model. If they can't, they aren't legitimate businesses.

One last comment: Not all businesses are conducive to a pay per use or pay per user model. For some things, that simply does not work. This is exactly why advertising has been used for decades by content providers, even before there was an Internet.


> One last comment: Not all businesses are conducive to a pay per use or pay per user model. For some things, that simply does not work. This is exactly why advertising has been used for decades by content providers, even before there was an Internet.

I'm not sure why anyone would care that these businesses don't work. Why are we expected to prop up businesses that don't work?




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