I saw a comment on social media the other day saying that the internet golden age was in the late 1990s. According to opinion, today's web is dominated by a handful of sites and a bunch of clickbait on those sites designed to take your money. So much for good quality and inventive content, then.
We are all pretty much web-designers on Steemit, we write content with a rewards system. One hopes that rewards reflect quality as well as personality and popularity. Do we write click-bait posts with low grade content in an expectation to show some ppi advertising? I hope not. We try to only share links that add value to our content right?
We can't argue with the fella, though, can we? There is truthfully a lot of pap online that is purely designed to make money. There's nothing in it for the consumer. Even the ads are irrelevant. Why is this? There will always be people out there looking to make easy money with a few clever tricks. They might have spent years learning those tricks and therefore feel entitled to use them. Provided it's legal, then why not? Should we care about user experience?
We do care about user experience and we make a big effort to always improve it. We content creators want to bring in people for the right reasons don't we? Good quality content that serves a direct purpose for the reader is what it is all about. So why do so many people gravitate towards capitalism instead of communication? Maybe it's because they are fed up of working for next to nothing.
Hands up who has given a donation to their favourite online media? Mine is up. I have a feeling I am in the minority, though. When a site offers great content that we enjoy, a coin in the pocket is the natural thing to do, at least every now and then. But hey, no-one's looking, and that means we can get away with not paying. When you see people giving generously in a crowd but never giving when privately asked online you wonder why they give? Is it a virtue signal or a genuine desire to help?
The less that we reward content creators, the more we rely on capitalist models to turn that into livable income. The capitalist web is a result of the capitalist reader. The irony is that many of these tight-fisted scrooges are the ones who preach left-wing policies about giving more and keeping less. You ask them to support a genuine business based on goodwill and they refuse.
If you ask any freelance web-designer what their biggest challenge is, they'll likely say getting paid. Content creators of all kinds produce regular internet media that thousands of people or more enjoy. So please let's change our ways and begin offering genuine rewards for content we enjoy. This doesn't mean handing over taxation amounts, just a few pennies, the change from your shopping for example. If we give more then the content will no longer need to be so sales based.
So, internet readers, the choice is yours. We can either build a fair and equitable internet or we can be self-interested penny-pinchers that forces the internet into becoming one big shopping mall.