Isn’t it an incentives problem? Everyone wants their news for free and you have to optimized for clickbate and outrage to generate revenue.

Most on nostr would agree that the clickbait revenue model is fiat and is corrected by a return to sound money…however, what to do about the problem of low willingness to pay for information? In old(er) times (even after 1971) there was a geographic monopoly or at least channel monopoly for content distribution. Now information transmits ubiquitously and instantaneously while pretty good content can be generated quickly and cheaply by almost anyone. The marginal cost to produce ideas is essentially free…wouldn’t that mean good information is “worthless”?

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I would imagine you have to decouple news from profits. You’d also probably not need national news - instead, aggregate it via some sort of a network. Not sure how you’d achieve that though. In the age of instant connection socials, it’s pretty hard to compete with amateurs who happen to be in the right place at the right time. And if you took profit out of the picture then you’d likely have some other authority breathing down your neck and expressing satisfaction or dissatisfaction with your reporting. I don’t have answers. It’s an interesting topic worth contemplating and discussing!

Profit (and more philosophically self-interest) is what pure capitalism (and thus bitcoin) is all about. I’d imagine that a bitcoin standard will reduce clutter because fewer people will be baited into wasting their precious time on apps / phones. Maybe a return to the importance of local news stories and local job postings and local events brings back a renaissance of paper distribution? Maybe the content generated more broadly focuses on restoring trust to brands and asks for a premium to sustain and maintain content that cultivates that trust? Maybe the frequency of consumption goes down and we return to a world where books and reference materials are generated less on demand, short form and more focused on accuracy, resiliency, and take the shape of books and/or volumes. Lots of angles at play but I agree that the celebrity culture “click here gossip”, and everyone is a geopolitical expert in the hours following an event must change. It’s too crowded and everyone’s opinion is not as valuable as valuable as we currently allow/enabke. (Even nostr is flawed here…there is an ease to posting without an explicit cost that puts the burden on the consumer rather than the producer of the content. Prevailing opinion is that the market corrects for this but I think the burden must be shared with the creators otherwise it becomes unwieldy for the consumers to stop all the silly noise embedded with the signal.) @jack

I think the more data points we have on any given subject, the better. Noise or not. I do agree that we’ll likely see trusted sources we subscribe to much in the same way we already do with substack. Independent journalists who take the time to build credibility and trust will be rewarded. You don’t need to be a news mill to do well in that economic model. I guess you could say we are already on that path. It’s likely that as the writer grows in audience, he or she will establish their own media company - growing the types of resources available to them without sacrificing quality and not having to rush. Bitcoin does seem to align with that model. It just means total irrelevance of any other types of news (at least from a trust perspective). Maybe in the end it all come down to personal education and understanding of the various ways news is broken. People will just need to be ok with less dopamine generating garbage.