Technology

I think the “garbage is free” narrative needs to change. AI generated garbage sure isn’t free, you pay for it with your attention and your data. Publishers need to make money somehow, and they can either do that with tracking cookies that harvest your data and sell it to the highest bidder, or in reality, both. If average consumers had any idea of how much data they give up for “free” content or services on the internet, I think more people would be okay with paywalls, and I think there would be a lot more pressure on paid subscription/service providers to use paywall revenue as an alternative to, instead of in addition to, the surveillance capitalism method that’s so pervasive right now

I think the Verge messed up: the announcement said there would be a full-text RSS feed for subscribers, but they've actually added full article text to the existing feed, where normally I'd only get 2 or 3 paragraphs.

Their sister site Vox made a similar mistake; their RSS feed already had full text, but once they added the paywall I got the full text of articles that were paywalled if I tried to click through to the site. It's like Vox Media doesn't fully understand how its RSS feeds work.

In this case the garbage is behind the pay wall then. Verge is all opinion pieces and cheap content nowadays anyway.

You go right the fuck ahead, Verge. Your content wasn't worth free.

I used to donate to Vox back when it was free. I'm such a sucker.