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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Surely you can reverse that and point out corporations whining and moaning about people expecting free content when they're barely paying their employees enough to afford to pay their bills.
The problem starts with corporate greed, hoarding revenue by keeping employee's salaries to the minimum acceptable, providing as little functionality as possible to reduce overheads, double dipping by selling a product/subscription and then selling their customer's data, and then complaining they aren't getting more money for what little they are doing.
Then inevitably a little guy like Kbin comes along and suffers because the internet is filled with soulless, ultra-capitalist corpo scumbags.
Those are separate issues
They are absolutely not separate issues. How can I be expected to shell out $15 per month for 10 different content subscriptions if I can only just afford to put food on my table?
Doesn't mean that content producers and the people running services don't need to eat too. Sure, many if not all big corporations are terrible, but not all online content is provided by them.
But a massive amount of them are. Small and solo creators on Youtube or Twitch need to conform to the rules of Google and Amazon, and even medium size creators are influenced and coerced by the precedents and market trends set by the much larger corporations.
And it doesn't matter if not all content is provided by large corporations, those large corporations employ the most people, and dictate in a lot of ways, the rules of the employment market. It's due to their habits and practices that wages are artificially low and expenses are inflated for record profits.
Until corporate greed is managed properly, consumers will always struggle to have enough expendable income to pay content creators, and therefore will always be searching for free content.
Oh yeah, no disagreement there; the source of all these problems is ultimately an economic system designed by and for sociopaths. But, be that as it may, the fact that even the people who could afford to pay for services simply don't, and many run adblockers too and rarely turn them off for eg. news sites even if the ads they run aren't extremely distracting. For example when ABP introduced a whitelist for "non-annoying" ads, it didn't exactly go down well and people said they had "sold out."
Big corporations can get fucked for all I care, but as I said, the ones not working for them and running services or news media or whatever also need to eat, and peoples' reticience to pay for things in one way or another has directly led to those big companies taking over more and more of the field and WEI is an outgrowth of that.