When it was difficult to publish writing, music, and video, publishers naturally came to exist because of the high barrier to entry for widespread distribution. But today no such physical or monetary barrier exists, the barriers that do exist are legal or technical ones. Perhaps the legal are some deliberate scheme to protect old money business models, but I find it more likely it’s more a matter of inertia.
The technical barriers will not last. There are many people who haven’t got nor desire the technical skills to publish their own media on Internet. I suspect this is at least part of the appeal of mainstream social media: you don’t have to be a nerd to interact with people on the Internet, it’s so easy anyone can do it with little effort. I’m hopeful that as more people become acquainted with the Internet earlier and technical education becomes more prominent, a DIY spirit to publishing will flourish. While this doesn’t ease the problem today of massive publishers owning the rights to what might justifiably be considered public domain, the next Mickey Mouse or Happy Birthday Song might not have the same problem.
This is rather like the infamous quip that “if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.” I cannot imagine that a highly technically literate consumer base would be willing to subject themselves to the policies of many of today’s Internet giants. In particular, Facebook, and social media with similar business models, sell your attention to advertisers. In the early days, these services are great: they’ve usually received a huge amount of capital and provide a service users want to get their attention. When the capital runs dry, the investors want their 100x return, and the service has the user’s attention, they sell the users attention using information the users inputted themselves. To the degree that the service doesn’t want to lose users, it tries to keep them happy, but the incentives have misaligned, especially when the companies go public: it’s time to make profit grow. There’s nothing wrong with public companies seeking growth, but it does run the risk of harming user privacy and the Open Web.
A microblog of your very own
This is the raison d’être of Sudophilosophical: this is my attempt to live in the future, to self-publish my thoughts, lofty and tiny alike, to the World Wide Web. There’s no pressure for 100x profits or to sell out my readers. I’m rather hopeful for that direct sponsorship and individual contributions will enable individuals to run sustainable content production now and in the future. Platforms like Facebook Instant Pages, Google AMP, and Apple News may be eating publishers, but I hope that technically savvy users will eat platforms next.
With this in mind, I’ve re-thought the structure of this website to accommodate for an important type of media: the microblog. As of today, in the sidebar, there are a couple of options for readers who would like to subscribe via RSS:
- All – a is the feed of everything,
- Articles – a feed of all long-form,
- Microblog – a feed of all short-form,
- Podcast – a feed of all spoken-word.
Dave Winer published a note about publishing long-form content where he muses:
Last night I posted a tweet: “Next time you want to post an essay to Medium, do the open web a favor and post it elsewhere. Anywhere. Tumblr. WordPress.com.”
I think he’s absolutely right, but not quite radical enough. It seems to me obvious to retort: Next time you want to post under 140 characters to Twitter, do the open web a favor and post it elsewhere. Specifically, your own website, not Tumblr or WordPress.com.
Publish-it-yourself
Detractors might argue that this is all well and good for individuals, but maybe not bigger organizations with loftier journalistic goals. John West argues for supporting publishers directly in “Death by a thousand likes”:
We need to stop pretending that content is free. Publications need to ask readers to pay for their content directly, and readers need to be willing to give up money, as opposed to their privacy and attention.
To the contrary, we need to stop pretending that publishers are necessary. I agree that the production of content can be quite costly, but the distribution of content in the digital age is basically free. The cost of hosting this site is about $25.00/month, and it managed to weather through a Hacker News hug-of-death (more on that later) of 52,000 visitors in 24 hours. I don’t see why publishers are necessary if everyone on Earth has access to the World Wide Web. Paul Krugman and disenfranchised minorities alike would be able to publish their thoughts at near-zero cost, and monetize their business directly by selling sponsorships, merchandise, speeches, or a variety of other goods and services.
These are very similar arguments as those that were trotted out with regards to Parse shutting down. I’d like to appropriate what Marcus Arment said about Parse for use here:
For whatever it’s worth, running your own Linux servers today with boring old databases and stable languages is neither difficult nor expensive. This isn’t to say “I told you so” — rather, if you haven’t tried before, “You can do this.”
Getting WordPress running on a Linode today, I admit, is beyond many people. But I look forward to the near future when people who want to express themselves don’t reach for a venture-backed advertising-platform-in-the-making, but rather their very own cloud server.