&quot;It only really makes sense if you view writing as a fungible commodity&quot;<p>I have no sympathy for writers here. You view us readers as fungible commodity. I use Reddit, HN, Facebook and twitter to weed out the worst bullshit. There are lots of articles around just to keep me comfy long enough to show me adds. One of the worst these days is New Yorker, beautifully written articles about stuff people don&#x27;t really care about. (Or atleast I don&#x27;t care about.) Currently it survives on elitism. Web platforms are problematic. But lot better than ordering magazines at random, or paying for New Yorker monthly for that yearly gem.<p>“Go where the readers are”<p>It&#x27;s more important to write what the readers want to read. I click stupid shit. I read mediocre pieces. I&#x27;m willing to pay for good stuff.<p>I think there should be ordering&#x2F;crowd funding service solely for written media. So that authors don&#x27;t just babble nice sentences inside their comfort zone, but actually tackles things people are interested in.<p>The real problem is that author doesn&#x27;t know if s&#x2F;he gets paid before the article is written, but also the reader doesn&#x27;t know if the article is worth anything before reading it.<p>I think the author of this piece has many good points, he just needs to dig deeper. This bleak context free future the author is painting is probably not true. People like context. Any social meeting is often first superficial introductions, then shallow gossip and only later dvelves into deep stuff. Internet is probably going to mirror that, but with more inertia.