That alone has made me much MUCH more leery to subscribe to anything if it's not something that can easily be canceled (For example, using Google play to subscribe to things since they make it easy to unsubscribe).
It's pretty much everywhere. I just assume it of apps on my phone.
Then the credit card processor asks for card details, full address, phone number, captcha, browser fingerprinting, IP address reputation, validate the payment in your bank's app, reject foreign cards, reject prepaid cards, and so on.
Then a customer like me who is literally at the checkout trying to give them money isn't allowed to.
And they're selling digital goods - pixels are free, a non-paying customer doesn't cost them anything!
A whole class of site is on the chopping block as ad revenue and clicks dry up. For actual journalism worth paying for increasingly paywalls are popping up to compensate for these factors.
Us: "Here Google, I've done your bidding to earn higher placement in your search engine"
Google: "Thanks for all the data, idiot. Now we'll show it on our site and claim it as ours"
Our organic traffic is WAY down despite nonstop kowtowing to their demands.
I don't understand this viewpoint at all. I follow specific writers for their voice, not in spite of it. A whole lot of people seem to be hallucinating this past moment in history when news was strictly factual information, delivered with no editorializing, from people who had no opinions or ideas, and I genuinely have no idea what they're talking about. Walter Cronkite would frequently editorialize about events he was reporting. All the major historical men and women of news would, that's... the point, you're not just tuning in to know what happened today, you're tuning in to experience those events through the eyes of someone you've at least got some vague trust relationship with.
And I categorically reject any notion that it's better to get a summary via AI. I can clock articles written with heavy AI use and I dislike their monotone and... well, inhuman writing style. Frequently, especially as of late, current events need the touch of an empathetic human with their own ideas.
If you require your news filtered through a bias-remover, IMO you just lack media literacy. I can read something from someone I disagree with on basically everything and still get the facts out of it. Frankly: skill issue.
So yes, people lack media literacy. Billions of people currently online are experiencing their first generation of exposure to the what the world of news and other media has to offer in any real sense. Instead of wagging a finger at them and calling them ignorant lets accept all of what's changed and adapt accordingly.
I follow specific writers for their voice, not in spite of it
I mean, I think there are numerous things to point to explain such things, but I think the two big ones would be:
* The ongoing deadening of our attention spans and the normalization of products that foster addiction in their users often to the detriment of those users to drive profits
* The ongoing attacks on education fostered by the right wing here and elsewhere creating a more ignorant, and less literate electorate. Media literacy itself requiring literacy to be taught, and as is touted frequently, most people can't read above 6th grade.
> Then the radio and TV democratized that to an extent, but nothing has remade the marketplace for information like the internet and smartphones.
I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say "TV democratized media"? TV (and radio really) is still incredibly centralized, now more than ever. As to a marketplace of information, I don't think information is the issue at hand, we have more information now than at any time in human history. Almost all of us carry a device in our pockets that would give us the answer to any question we had, were we so inclined to ask, yet misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda are perhaps more prolific than ever before.
What is lacking now, IMO, is the ability for the reader, again, to think critically and sort the wheat from the chaff of that massive wellspring of information. Which follows neatly into...
> Instead of wagging a finger at them and calling them ignorant lets accept all of what's changed and adapt accordingly.
I'm not calling them ignorant, I am stating the fact that they are ignorant. Ignorance is not a criticism, it's the natural state one finds themself in when they are uninformed on a topic. It's also pretty easily fixed unless one is unduly attached to their ignorance in some way that benefits them.
I also don't believe it's strictly their fault that they are ignorant, because our country has spent decades defunding and attacking it's own education system, and other countries similarly, ultimately I believe because a less educated, less thinking electorate is easier to manipulate.
That why Salon is disappearing. I used to read it, and I thought it disappeared around the time Brill's Content and The Standard went under.
I haven't seen Salon in a Google search result in years.
https://www.tiktok.com/@darntootin85/video/71685843451401372...
I tried to find a source other than TikTok, c'est la vie.