A strong +1 to this thoughtful comment. I will also add an non-monetary perverse incentive, which is best described in this changed-my-worldview-forever post: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...

Seriously, you will start seeing this everywhere

to paraphrase the post for others: institutional positions like "director of the CDC" or "the website that always shows up first when searching for medical stuff" are subject to systemic (largely cultural) pressures that influence them to publish information that is not just straightforward truth.

Thought provoking and certainly true in it's central conceit as a piece - I do wish more people spent the time to think in terms of systems dynamics. It's such an incredibly bright flashlight in the dark closet that is the complexity of the current information landscape.

I would like to add what I feel is a missing part of the analysis, though - the problem of centralization. One of the primary factors compounding the social effects that article describes.

It's like we've forgotten what the early Internet was and what made it great - it was a patchwork of lovely, golden inefficiency that meant that no matter how wrong you were, only so many people would be exposed to that wrong so it really didn't matter so much. Like we take for granted that there's "the one search engine", "the one social media platform", "the one medical site" et al.

I extend this thinking to our pre-Internet institutions as well - the larger and more centralized and older an institution gets, the more rot it's subject to. Efficiency doesn't just accelerate the good stuff - it accelerates every outcome of the process.

Banks 'too big to fail' broadcast economic crises to every corner. Highly liquid markets and scalable financial products accelerate recursive processes towards that failure.

Monolithic news networks and social platforms bind information signals together so that the loudest (not necessarily the most true) have the furthest reach, which recurses to a fever pitch. This process is accelerated by the efficiency of information gathering that is googling.

It feels like what's needed is a refragmenting of our systems in general - a dissolution of large, tightly bound systems into disparate, inefficient clusters that slow the churn and isolate components from toxic vectors.. but that leaves a bad taste in many people's mouths.

> ... think in terms of systems dynamics

I think the main problem is that we lack better tools to communicate (and simulate) those systems. The existing ones are hard to use or require technical knowledge. And without them, we can only tackle very simple problems, our minds are not limitless.

For example, multiple times I've had a system design in my head, which I was convinced I knew how it worked, until I tried to express it in details in english, or code it.

You ever notice how the article will be titled something like “Analysis: Here’s why Putin won’t use nukes.” A point that could be easily summarized, but won’t ever be in the article—it will always show up at the bottom, preceded by a bunch of already known context information. It’s so they can sell ad spots in between as you scroll down.

Any headline starting with "Here's why..." reeks of clickbait, or at least low-value content.

+1 for paying for good information, which is what the author Yuval Harari recommends. He asks why we are willing to pay for high quality food, clothes etc., but not for high quality information.

But the answer is obvious, isn't it? Information is almost free to reproduce. Food, clothes, etc. are not. I'm not saying that's why information should be free, but that's why most people expect it to be free.

Information might be free to reproduce, but it's not free to produce.

And people in general probably seriously underestimate the cost of production vs. reproduction. I'm pretty sure the average person thinks the costs associated with a physical book are a lot higher than an ebook and they really aren't--at least for a book involving editors, etc.

Do you have a good source on that? I have been looking around for these kinds of costs and found nothing I could trust.

I've seen various figures of the years, e.g. https://www.davidderrico.com/cost-breakdowns-e-books-vs-prin...

But all the figures I've seen suggest that printing/distribution/remainders/etc. are in the low single digits so that even if you ignore any of the costs that are unique to ebooks, there is no reason for ebooks (or for that matter paperbacks) to be significantly cheaper than hardcovers other than price discrimination.

Even before ebooks, it used to be standard for hardcovers to sell at list price for a year or so at which point they came out as paperbacks selling for maybe half the price.

Hmm. What about storage, delivery, returns, etc.? Quote from your source: "Now, I think they’ve underestimated the costs of shipping and warehousing books, and the tremendous cost of accepting returns (for full credit) of unsold books by bookstores — sometimes paying for return shipping, sometimes having the books simply destroyed, and other times selling them in bargain bins for a fraction of the cover price."

Information has a non-zero cost for the first unit, and zero cost for each unit thereafter. In other words, marginal cost is zero. These types of goods are hard to find a market equilibrium for.

I'm not sure that's true. You're describing just about every SaaS out there. (Yes, there's some per customer cost of resources and sales/support but in general relatively little compared to initial and ongoing development.) What is true however is that you need to be able to prevent people from acquiring your product/service for that very low or zero marginal cost.

That's it - ongoing development. You should constantly invest in the development of your SaaS product, unlike the example with the books

Paul Samuelson[0] makes the argument here[1] when discussing how lighthouse economics works that anything with zero marginal costs that has a price other than free is by definition an economic loss. Therefore you should find other ways to fund lighthouses, and by extension, all media and software.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson

[1]: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ335/out/lighthouse.pdf - page 359, first paragraph

I understand how the situation got here. I just felt my curated "resources" were drying up and wanted to see how everyone is going about it.

Thanks for the interesting blogs link will check it out.

> 1. Pay for publications

That doesn’t mean you’re not still the product. They can resell your information and use the journal as propaganda just as much as before, well, even more, since they have your full ID and address.

No, we need ethics in journalism, but this train has long gone. Can’t remember the last time I saw both sides of a story in the same article, that must have been decades ago.

No one said that paid publications are guaranteed to be high quality. But non-paid corporate publications are (practically) guaranteed to be low-quality.

One thing to be aware of is that the titles and headlines of professionally-produced publications are often written by editors rather than authors, and are not a reliable guide to the quality (or even the content) of the article. Dealing with the dross is just part of the cost of finding the gold.

And it's worth noting that headlines have often been "clickbaity" since before there were clicks. Look at the print edition of The Economist. A lot of the heds (in publishing lingo) are plays on words etc. (although the subhead/dek) does tend to be fairly straightforward. Online, their heds tend to be more literal--probably because of SEO.

Very true. That said The Economist newspaper (print edition) is my answer to the OP. The heds are just an example of the talent at their disposal. The paper is expensive but I’ve subscribed for 25 years without a single regret. Their podcasts are now rising to the same quality.

I subscribe as well. The US weekly news magazines never had the depth of The Economist but at least in pre-Internet days they gave you a reasonable summary of important things. But in the past decade they've totally declined into irrelevance. Not even sure what print editions still exist.

I don't read it cover to cover. There's a fair bit of international detail that I just don't find very interesting or relevant but it covers so many things that there's plenty to read about.

If you're in the UK, combination of The Economist and Private Eye will give you very high quality information every two weeks, in print.

I used to get most of my news every week in the US from Time Magazine when it was still a pretty decent weekly. I'm not sure that knowing what's going on by the minute is clearly an improvement. (I do read The Economist now.)

Financial Times is also very refreshing to read. Usually the comments section adds as much value as the articles themselves.

+1 to paid content. It takes non-trivial effort to create original, insightful, and high-quality content. Lot of research, cross verification, fact checking, hunting for non-obvious insights etc., A good source is papers from the researchers working in the field. But their primary audience tends to be their peers so they compress their papers and pack it with ton of context. It takes quite a bit of effort to make that research accessible to non-specialists.

>because they have a main job, and it's not a business for them to share their thoughts on things

Or their main job is paying them in part, even if often informally, to produce thoughtful externally-facing content but no one is strictly evaluating them on the basis of pageviews. Which is actually fairly common in the tech field.

>It's more time-consuming to listen to them over reading, of course.

For me, consuming podcasts is just a different mode. I listen to them mostly in a car when I can't read. I rarely listen to them otherwise.

1. good point

2. tons of clickbait there too, plus he mentioned there are very few quality blogs left

3. books... oh my god... need to dig through a pile of poop for days just to find one quality book these days

And an important extension to 1. are things which are arranged as a nonprofit, and don't need ads. Wikipedia and Pro Publica are examples that jump to mind.

A friend did a mix of this. They positioned themselves as the best soccer magazine in the country. The only way to get quality sports articles was paying people who were in the zone, so they paid per article instead of hiring full time.

Typical ads pulled in insufficient revenue, so they started selling ad space to sponsors. This was only possible because they built credibility. Credibility based journalism is different to eyeballs and views.

From that credibility, they started selling merchandise and sports equipment.

As a high volume podcast consumer, I find it interesting that US casts are pretty much all following a completely ad based model, while German ones are much more subscription/donation based.

And yes, paying for good journalism is inevitable if you want quality. Just, if the crowd picks up the tab, nobody needs to listen to ads.

"Turns out that if the business model of the publication is selling ads, they're interested in reach."

The "tech" company "business model" is selling ads. 100%. The "tech" company produces zero content. To use a popular "tech" company example, according to Zuckerberg, Facebook is a "platform" not a publisher. Here, "platform" means intermediary.

Looking to "tech" companies as a "source" of high quality content is therefore a failing endeavour. To the extent publishers use a "tech" company as an intermediary for "reach", as anyone can see, the quality of the content is not going to be high.

Eliminating the intermediary and returning to real business models that are not 100% advertising-based ("tech" is out) is one way to return to a world with more high quality content. "Tech" companies have no way to make money besides operating as intermediaries and selling advertising services, so they will continue to facilitate clickbait "content" for their own benefit.