Comment by Goronmon@lemmy.world on IGN immediately lays off every non-UK person at their newly bought sites, including some key members like deputy editor Alice Bell

Welp, this didn’t take long.

It’s especially interesting that they laid off a lot of people who were the only ones in their particular job, leaving entire jobs uncovered. I suspect this comes right before shutting them entirely or doing it all “with AI” 🤮.

Sad in particular about Alice Bell. She was fantastic, and it always felt like she kept the site going through all the shit of recent years. Plus being the driving force behind their podcast (the Electronic Wireless Show) of course also spells doom for that one though I hope that like Indiescovery they go rogue and run it independent of the site.

Bleak times. Fuck IGN.

We also need people to realize that it’s not sustainable to expect free content while running an ad-blocker.

This is the big one. people have grown accustomed to an unsustainable system, problem is wages are still so stagnanted so nobody has money for 10 subs to things.

I disable my adblocker on RPS. They also have a subscriber system which works well I reckon (although I don’t partake)

i’ll turn off my adblocker when i can be confident that your site won’t show me ads for child porn or actual fucking scams.

And not make the site impossible to use.

Most sites nowadays its impossible to actually read a goddamn article without 5 pop in videos and ad breaks.

I disagree. Ads are not the answer. Treating them as such is simply giving up.

Agreed, ads are not the answer. Paying for content is the answer.

But people want their content to be free, while also being angry that their free content contains ads.

Bro $4,000 OLED TVs are riddled with rows of home screen ads. What are you talking about that paid content has no ads? ALL CONTENT HAS FUCKING ADS. This has gotten absurd. Fuck ads.

What are you talking about that paid content has no ads?

The article that OP posted is on a site that allows you to pay and from what I can tell doesn’t have any obvious ads that I’ve seen.

But at the end of the day, find a site you like, pay for the content if you can and run an ad-blocker.

I’m not responding to OP. I’m responding to you.

OK? I was giving you an example of “paid content with no ads” that you claimed didn’t exist. What is confusing you?

Because content distributors haven’t thought of another way to get money. The only other thing they came up with is subscriptions. Some have thought of donations, but they haven’t banded together to come up with an alternative. It’s weak and totally mid.

Literally what other options are there?

Outside of straight cash and ads, off the top of my head a user could give a website data, content, or computing power. Which, as I kept writing this, I’ve found aren’t perfect alternatives.

Personal data collection seems compelling, since the data can be sold to hungry data brokers looking to optimise their ads, but tech-savvy users want to keep their data safe, either by using plugins to block ads and tracking, or by not using your website. And you’d also have to have no soul to do this.

User generated content gives users a reason to engage and return, and it also means you could save money that you’d have otherwise used to pay someone to make content. If you rely on this too much though, ethical concerns become apparent - last I checked, Reddit mods are unpaid.

Volunteer computing could maybe lower costs by offloading some server calculations onto volunteer’s computers when idle, but I don’t know if it could even be used for that. It’s probably a non-starter for websites, too; to a user it would seem like your site was asking them to install a crypto miner.

… this comment is getting too long and doesn’t really have a point. But I can’t let the 45 minutes I spent writing it go to waste so easily. Hm… what if I combined all 3 ideas?

Yes, a website that asks you to volunteer idle computer time to train an algorithm that can both be outsourced to other companies and used to analyse your personal data, which itself can be given to other companies and used to reccomend you posts you are more likely to comment on, adding value to the website! Surely this has none of the flaws that I described before.

The problem is that ad-driven businesses are price dumping by tricking people into using their services by telling them it’s free, and thus killing the market for everyone else. I am not turning my adblocker off. I do not expect “free” content in perpetuity. I expect the “free” content business model to die off.

I expect the “free” content business model to die off.

I don’t. I expect the vast majority of people will continue to demand free content while simultaneously complaining about the quality of said content.

Yeah, unfortunately many people seem to default to complaining about things while continuing to consume what they are fed. And not change anything, of course.

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IGN immediately lays off every non-UK person at their newly bought sites, including some key members like deputy editor Alice Bell(aftermath.site)

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