While the problem is unlikely to have an ideal solution, I suspect that patron style systems are the most practical solution.

It is probably the system that is most likely to encourage people to contribute based upon their assessed value of the content and the least likely system to be gamed.

How do you ensure that creators are compensated equitably? You don't even try. Instead, creators depend upon the randomness of the decisions of contributors. It won't always be fair, but it is doubtful that it would create a race to the bottom.

If so many people are voluntarily making so much of something that the market price is basically free, why is that even a problem that needs a solution?

Yeah, that's a fair point. The old media only existed because of technological limits and a near monopoly over their market, and as new forms of media have arose, that monopoly has slowly fell apart.

The internet has just provided the final nail in the coffin there, and all these attempts to fight for relevance/get payment from companies like Google and Facebook are a dying industry's attempt to basically postpone the inevitable.

The problem isn't volunteering or things being free. The problem is people getting bullshit jobs or even harmful-to-the-world jobs to pay the bills so they can do their volunteering. The problem is a world of extreme inequity in wealth and political power. The problem is that most products remain non-free by being encumbered by ads and paywalls.

The fact is, even when things are totally free, big money finds a way to bury those things. Similar to people who used to rent DVDs from a store when their public library down the street had the same DVD on the shelf at no extra cost.

If we could destroy the funding of the ad- and paywall-driven businesses, the free stuff could shine. Of course, better to move the funding to the free stuff and have it be even better.

Bullshit jobs are an orthogonal problem, though. With solutions like UBI, or different arrangements wrt ownership of capital. I don't think it makes much sense to narrowly focus on it in the context of content creation.

I just meant that BS jobs are a symptom of a society that doesn't fund creative work where it matters. If we did fund creative work better (however we did), a lot of creative people would leave their BS jobs.

As David Graeber put it, people need an "out". UBI is a good out, but well-funded meaningful creative work is another potential out for at least some people.

That's the thing, though - it's pretty clear that the market for creative work has too much supply and too little demand for it to be well-funded for everybody who wants to participate. Any arrangement that you make to change that is going to be welfare in disguise; so why not just be honest with ourselves, and spell it out? Let people have UBI that's good enough to actually live on - and then they can do creative work that they want to do, without having to worry about how they'll sell it.