I'm not sure if you read it, but this brought a piece by Venkat Rao to mind. Software might not be eating the whole world. Maybe just the middle class. :/ On a related side note, part of my impetus for the 'following authors' suggestion has to do with giving them a toehold. I'm seeing numerous new blogging platforms like medium and svbtle popup, and I'm not sure that it's headed to a healthy place. It seems to me that a large camp believes that institutions of journalism can be replaced with platforms. This may or may not be true. However, IMO any positive outcome needs to intrinsically link value to the author, regardless of the size of their readership. This might not be a big issue for Bors, but for those following in his footsteps, the landscape might be less fertile. I do see that there is an issue that authorship might be an edge case for Hubski, and could bias the types of submissions here. I'm not sure it can be implemented in a useful way. But, that's my reasoning.
Meh. Ryan Holiday put it much more precisely in Trust Me I'm Lying when he observed that the rise of Huffington Post and their ilk exactly mirrors the rise of Yellow Journalism - the era when papers were sold primarily on streetcorners by being more shocking and lascivious than the next. The New York Times effectively put an end to it by putting out a reliable source of news based on the subscription model. In other words, Holiday predicts that those behind the paywall are right - the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are, in fact, succeeding. Granted, they are not succeeding as they were, but they now have a stable business model again. Holiday effectively argues, however, that it will get worse before it gets better. That's actually one of the driving reasons behind my giving NSFWCorp money: Mark Ames made the pitch that if they're charging seven dollars a month instead of one seventyeth of a cent per click, they can be a legit, benefits-providing, salary-paying news organization with as few as 30,000 subscribers.... whereas if they did it based on click advertising, they'd need millions of pageviews a day. That's one reason I reject Rao's mindset. Another is that Groupon and their ilk aren't "zombifying" the buying public, they're taking coupon books digital. Coupon books have been a scam for the past 50 years, but the modern Internet generation has no experience with them so they haven't figured that out yet. It's all free-market capitalism, warts'n'all. It's on the business owner to realize that offering a groupon will not get him long-term customers, it will just penalize him for reaching out to markets he has no business being in in the first place.