You can definitely have ads like Reddit or StackOverflow that work fine though. Messing with the content itself is the problem.

My impression was that the folks at Quora never got community and content the way that those two did. Stack Overflow's founders effectively provided an audio playbook in their podcast (before Jeff left) and anyone could have followed it to create a great Q&A site. This is just one demonstration of their attention to detail. They experimented with business models, and got growth on a technical platform that turns out to have been very efficient.

Quora seemed like the Silicon Valley solution to this problem with too much focus on monetization ahead of establishing a truly great experience. Looking at Crunchbase they had $226M funding compared to Stack Overflow's $68M. I know it's more complicated than those numbers, but I feel like that funding is squandered on Quora.

> Quora seemed like the Silicon Valley solution to this problem with too much focus on monetization ahead of establishing a truly great experience.

I think that pretty much sums up how I feel about Silicon Valley and what it's come to stand for. Earlier, it was about building something cool that people used (and make a good living doing it). Then some of those cool things ended up making so much money, that now it's not about making creating, it's about making money.

The same thing happened with the mobile app stores. First it was about people making cool stuff that was useful, and then a few stories came out about how insanely lucrative some apps ended up being, and everyone wanted to make the next app and get rich.

Since this seems to be a natural emergent phenomenon with how our culture and technology interact, I guess I'm just hoping that somewhere along the lifecycle of the phenomenon it settles into a more sane paradigm where everyone isn't constantly on step X of what is essentially a get rich quick scheme.

Reddit's ads are the content. Most picture posts are ads of some sort, and comments are full of very apparent astroturfing.

Reddit also has the gilding system for making extra cash for when ads aren't enough.

The corollary is that spending money on information is the control for this.

Not really. People spend money on network/satellite TV, and that still comes with ads. Heck, they still spend money on newspapers and magazines, and those have ads too.

For most media outlets, someone paying is still someone they're gonna show ads too.

Sure, those models are among the ones you can spend your money on. And they are not the only options available.

My point still stands. It's all driven by an economics in some form or another and the more of the economics you drive the more it's possible for you to align the incentives to produce things in your favor. This is the case no matter which actor in the system you are.

Heck, you controlling the economics in terms of what you spend your money and attention on are really the only levers you've got in order to drive the supply/demand mechanism of the market. The other variables are technology and what the other people in the market are demanding as that effects what will be supplied.

If you had enough money you could pay for a one off piece of unique research if you really wanted to. These days you even get people subscribing to individuals on patreon as a model that exists.

Most people pay something for their communications in the form of home internet or cell service, so I don't think the answer is just nested paywalls or the internet would be more polite than it is.

I think you miss my point slightly but in your defense I didn't make it very well.

That people pay for the internet connection doesn't really have much effect on the economics. It's the payment for the production of the information or lack thereof that is driving the deleterious effects on quality of information that we are seeing.

This is mostly of our choosing too! And we will continue to put up with it until we don't and we sort out alternative systems. You can already see things changing with some sites putting up paywalls and some people choosing to pay or some people clicking away.

It's not an easy fix in aggregate, but as an individual it's possible to make choices where the economics isn't skewing in a direction you're not happy with. The trade-off is you might not be happy to pay for what you used to get for free. Well I don't have a good answer to that other than it is what it is.

Two good examples in my life at least I can think of is paying for access to Pluralsight means I'm getting high quality, in-depth, curated tech education on demand rather than scrappily piecing together random tutorials that bug me with passive aggressive "no, I don't want to become a coding ninja" ebook offers. The being I buy and read a decent amount of high quality books as the economics is structured such that they have to provide the value upfront before I'll exchange the money and the cost to produce the book is higher than just a blog post, so it's much more in-depth and Im not being sucked into anyone's marketing funnel.

All personal choices but I've been saying for years now the economics of the internet is somewhat busted as it relates to information. You just have to be careful and don't be afraid to use economics to drive the quality up in your favor.

Then there is stuff like Khan Academy. That's just out of this world awesome. Free and insane quality.

Then again that's a case of education as infrastructure. That guy put in the work to produce that content once and it can go on teaching forever. That is the real power of the internet, but it seems that's the exception to the rule.

Good points. Add Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy to the list of ways things can be better:

https://qz.com/480741/this-free-online-encyclopedia-has-achi...

I thought that sort of thing might be copied by more educators on more topics. Same non-profit or public-benefit corporation might run them all with some charter, license, and/or contract maximizing the availability while still making money to support content updates. Could be many doing this sort of thing.

Thanks for taking the time to lay out your ideas. I largely agree but I think individual-choice solutions are generally an unsatisfactory answer to what are often collective action problems.

Sure. It's two sides of the same coin though. In time the collective winds up settling on a new paradigm based on an aggregate series of individual choices that reflexively effect the markets they are acting on. It's a process that naturally plays out over time.

I think we're already seeing it play out in slo-mo over the last 6~8 years. It's becoming more and more noticeable that things are shifting now.