Slashdot: End of the Free Internet. This discussion was nominally brought on by a link to Ev’s The End Of Free.com weblog, but the discussion itself is actually more interesting. Most Slashdot readers feel that a subscription-based web would inevitably degenerate into:
I pay for connectivity (high-speed cable modem). I pay for hosting (this site, my book, other sites eventually). I pay for SpamCop, an ad-free, spam-resistant webmail system. Like many Slashdot readers, I would pay for Google if forced to. That’s about it. I used to pay for Slate, back when it was young and fresh and actually at www.slate.com instead of slate.msn.com. I finally canceled my subscription, and then they gave up on the subscription thing a few weeks later anyway.
I think that most content producers vastly overestimate the value of their content. By the same token, most readers (”content consumers” sounds so… impersonal) vastly underestimate the cost of making good content on a timely basis and aggregating it in one place. News aggregators like Radio and AmphetaDesk attempt to route around this problem by allowing individuals to aggregate their own content. But this doesn’t scale to a mainstream, mass-market solution, either technically or socially. Technically, because they have the same fundamental problem PointCast had years ago: it’s not really “push”, it’s “automated pull”, and (when the content gets too popular) this eventually generates too much traffic for not enough benefit to either the consumer or the producer. Socially, because it takes a lot of time and independent thinking to figure out which news sources you want to aggregate, and most people have neither the time nor the independent thought to put into it.
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